Introduction to Adrianna, a woman cybersecurity co-founder!
Hosts: Adrianna Gugel, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, Stealth Company
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriannagugel/
Kayla Williams
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/kayla-williams
Taylor Parsons
On ITSPmagazine | https://itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/taylor-parsons
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Episode Description
Adrianna is a co-founder and cybersecurity veteran. We will work through understanding what that is like to be a co-founder, understanding the market, and how the impact of being a woman has contributed to the mission.
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Resources
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For more podcast stories from The Locked Down Podcast With Kayla Williams and Taylor Parsons: https://itspmagazine.com/locked-down-podcast
Watch the webcast version on-demand on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllSNOVxx-zkXPYN6dxzuG8GG
Being a Woman Founder | A Conversation with Adrianna Gugel | Locked Down Podcast With Kayla Williams and Taylor Parsons
Taylor: [00:00:00] Welcome to the latest episode of Lockdown with Kayla and Taylor. With cybersecurity encompassing so many facets of business risk, it can be overwhelming and stressful. With our help, you'll be able to make sense of it all. This week, we are having a conversation with Adriana Google, a co founder and chief product officer of an AI company.
Adriana, welcome to the show. Appreciate you dialing in and being with Kayla and I today. Love for you to introduce yourself, obviously, Kayla and I know you but I don't think the rest of our listeners do yet. Hopefully this is just one of many occurrences we get to, work together and have an episode.
Adrianna: Yeah, this is just the beginning, but yeah, I'm so excited to be here, especially with two of my most favorite people. So I, yeah, I'm Adriana. I've been in doing what I do for 15, 20 years. But so yeah, I am a co founder of a current stealth stage AI startup which sounds really cool, but what it means is just we don't have our product ready to take to launch yet.
And a little bit about [00:01:00] me, I love cats. I don't know what else you want to know.
Taylor: Yeah. Fun fact, Adriana and I have. Worked on and off together, I think for eight years now. Nine, nine years. I don't know. We were both at carbon black a while ago. Both ended up at Devo where we both met Kayla and formed this circle of friends and this.
Kind of trust group of, senior leaders and professionals in cybersecurity. And we've all branched off in our own ways at this point. And it's amazing to watch, someone that you admire and respect become a co founder and become an entrepreneur. But really like where I'd want to start is, what inspired you to start an AI company?
Adrianna: Okay this is gonna sound a little weird, but just why not? Like a lot of people, like a lot of people say like, why did you choose to do this thing? Why do you think you can do it? And the real question is why not me? Like, why not me? Why can't I do it? And that's honestly, the cold hard truth of it.
So how [00:02:00] this came to be was I made it somewhat clear to certain people, like earlier in my career, that where I wanted to go was to found my own company. Like I wanted to found a company and I wanted to lead. That company. And I just felt that this was something that I could do really well. And so when my co founder had the idea and I came to talk to me, I was like, Oh, I'm not ready.
I'm not ready. And then it was like wait, you're never going to be ready. So now's the time. Absolutely. I love that.
Kayla: I think why not is the right way to answer that question. And I wish more people What answer? Including myself. I always end up, pontificating and thinking about these things a lot more.
But yeah, why not? Sometimes you just have to say yes. And I think that's your point perfectly there. So during the intro there from Taylor, he mentioned that you guys have worked together in the past and we've worked together. So I know you've come up with a security background and that [00:03:00] right there, I just saw the excitement in your face.
So how does your background and that expertise prepare you? And it has helped you with this journey that you're on right now.
Adrianna: Yeah. It's so funny. Like the fact that I was like, I don't, I have no idea what to say about me. There's nothing relevant and important, but I'm on a security podcast. So yeah I am freaking love, like I love security.
I, yeah, I've been in the security industry for about 10 years and met a tailor at carbon black and it's just been a, it's been a fun ride since the reason that I specifically got into security, like it was an intentional choice after being at a company where security was tangential.
And it was like, in terms of a product offering. And so it was like, Oh, there's this thing over here that seems to be really important. We should probably do a product in that area. And I started learning more about it. And as soon as I started learning about just the explosion of what was going on security space, I was like this is something I need to be part of because it matters.
[00:04:00] So for me, I'm really mission oriented and something that I absolutely love about cybersecurity industry is that it matters truly like every day, what you're working on matters. And it's the only industry that you have. A adversary that is constantly trying to one up you, right? It's not about I need to be better than my competitors and sure.
There's all of that stuff. Like a business perspective at the end of the day, you're making a real difference to real lives and there are people out there trying to stop you. And I think that's. Really awesome to be part of. Oh, and what, how does it relevant? Ah, great question. So why is it relevant?
Like you're starting a company in 2022 when we started it. If you do not start off with a security mindset, like what, how are you going to be successful? Just period, the end, right? To be able to provide a product to any business that is going to then use that product as part of their ecosystem, [00:05:00] they're trusting you, they're trusting you with their data, they're trusting you with how you have access to their system, and in order to demonstrate that trust, you need to have security by design, you need to be able to walk the walk.
So if you don't build it in from the very beginning it's really hard. To add it in later on,
Kayla: I, that obviously I can't agree more. I think that was very well said.
Taylor: Yeah. Like I have so many thoughts, right? Like you see a lot of up and coming companies. You see a lot of, great ideas that may or may not, fruition into legitimate offerings or, product enhancements, things like that.
But, leading with the intention of designing by security. I think that, that really separates success from failure. Because leading with intention and, leading with the, you Execution, I think are two different paths. And when you come in with a secure by design mindset you're much further down the execution path than I [00:06:00] intend to be security compliance.
No, I am security compliant. I am building a security compliance framework into everything that we're developing and everything that we're doing. And so that's absolutely amazing. And I think that, We could talk about, the crossroad and intersections of AI and security all day.
But really this is, first glimpse into, you and, becoming a co founder and a senior level executive chief product officer, which is like such a cool title, right? You hear CP something, and it's usually Oh, CPA, that person does my taxes. It's no, like CPO, it carries weight.
So what challenges, have you faced, starting a company in 2022 from like the technology security, AI intersection. And then, let's dive right into it. What is it like being a woman co founder in a predominantly male space?
Adrianna: Yeah. Okay. I'm going to take those as two separate questions because both of them are like good and meaty questions.
So the first question [00:07:00] is about building a company in the current atmosphere that we have today as it applies to security and AI. So there's actually something very relevant that I want to say to kick off this answer is that, the last question you're asking me about a founder and security, One of the things that I think is actually really important is that your founding team believes in security.
Like your founding team is saying security, your founding team says it's a value of our company that security is something that we will not compromise on because as a founder of an early stage startup, I will tell you the number of times suddenly there's a decision to be made and it's a business decision to be made.
And there's trade offs. And if you are at a team that is not able to say, we're not going to compromise on security, it's going to happen. It's just [00:08:00] going to happen. So it's not Hey, you got a couple of founders, you got an executive team and you bring a security person on the side to say, Hey, we do security.
If that person doesn't have not just a seat at the table, but a veto power at the table. You're just. There's no way. There's no way you're gonna survive. So I know that wasn't your question. But it's part of the answer in terms of the No, but it,
Taylor: It definitely gave me goosebumps because, so often you don't hear that.
Like you said, you bring in an executive team or a business minded organization to start a company or, facilitate the idea of starting a company. And it's, you've got MBAs, you've got, people with doctorates in data science and all of these things to support facts and relevance, and then you get it down the road, you start harboring data or you start, accepting payments.
And it's Oh, wait, um, we're a credit card processor now. Are we PCI compliant? And it's Oh, we're storing data from the EU. Are we GDPR [00:09:00] compliant? To your point, like having that veto power to be able to be like, hold on, stop, like all for decision making, but let's do it securely with the right appetite in mind to make sure that we understand what we're taking on and how that's going to iteratively impact every other decision.
Adrianna: Yeah. So I got an example, right? Because what's the point of talking about it if you can't show like this stuff. And I'm going to weave in another part of just the answer in general, because part of the answer is how do you make sure that security is top of mind when when you're in this environment and as a founder and everything like that is You need to have security mindset, but you also need to bring in people that share that value.
That's where I'm going. It needs to be part of literally the culture of the company. So where I'm going with this is that we have a CTO and a chief data scientist that we brought in about a year into our journey. And one of the most fundamental things for especially looking for in the CEO, sorry CTO [00:10:00] is what are the, what is their mindset for building a product?
What is their mindset? What does security and compliance mean to them? Like where is scalability and like performance and things like there's a big difference between, I want awesome, shiny features and Hey, we're going to sell to potentially enterprise clients. That means we need to be thinking about sock to literally right now, like we need to be making a strategic choice.
Do we want to be prepared to do FedRAMP, right? And what are those trade offs? Because at the very beginning of your platform design, you're thinking about it then it really sets you up really well for the future. And so that's an example where I will tell you, we were having SOC 2 conversations, like the week of hiring my CTO of what we were going to do and like how quickly we need to get to it and everything like that.
And And they are somebody that really believes in this stuff and has gone through a few different abilities to get SOC 2. Of course, there's the business decision to say if we're focused on this type of [00:11:00] foundational work right now, then we're not going to be able to get that feature work as quickly as you might want, right?
So he's coming to me being just like, I totally get it. I totally get where you're coming from. You Adriana chief product officer like you need to tell me what your priority is. What we ended up doing is saying like, all right, everything we build needs to be secure by design. We have to be following all of these practices.
We are, we made the strategic decision that, we're not looking to sell into the federal space anytime soon. So even though we're aware. Both of us have gone through the FedRAMP process before. We were, we know what those trade offs are. And we're like, we're not going to do that right now. And we're not going to tell anybody that we're doing it.
Cause it's a big lift. And we said, we're going to build the product this way so that when we want to spend the money and make the push to get the SOC 2, we'll do that. And that's, so what we didn't say was that's the very first thing that we're going to do. We said. We have to build it foundationally [00:12:00] so that we can get these things.
And there was that trade off. Yeah, maybe not the best example, but I have two more that I thought of just thinking about.
Kayla: Please feel free to share, but I am going to say yes, that is, that's fantastic. And the secure by design, secure by default, you are, you're starting to hear this more and more in companies.
And based on my experience, I think all of ours here and our listeners as well is building in security after the fact. It's a very difficult task because it involves that cultural evolution that needs to go into your company from a maturity perspective. Hearts and Minds campaign, time, resources, money that may or may not be available.
And then there's rework involved and that ends up costing more money. So I think that's Fantastic. That, that is top of mind and has been built in from the get go. I think that's going to save, if you can't see it now, but that will save so much money and effort [00:13:00] in the long run for the organization.
Adrianna: Which goes back to it's important the leaders know that because otherwise they're going to be making the trade offs to say I'm not getting money right now. I forgot to mention something about SOC 2 story. So Great. We said okay. We're building by design We are not going to say we must have SOC 2 before we launch But we will be able to show all the principles and document and all that kind of stuff, right?
But one of the things that we did say is that there's absolutely No way that a single customer, even in the alpha program is going to get on our platform if we do not have comprehensive auditing and metric tracking. And we're, and that is foundational or, and that in our ability to launch and it's the right decision because it's and it's so interesting now because we started our alpha program just recently.
And guess what? Suddenly the developers realized they couldn't just pop into an org because they really liked kind [00:14:00] of popping in and seeing what the product team was doing on like our test orgs and then user acceptance testing. And suddenly they had no access and they're like, wait, what's going on?
Like I have basically super admin access to our entire platform. And So like our C, this was not even something that I had to say to him, right? Going back to you, choose the right people. Like our CTO is just look, there's absolutely no way we're going to have somebody come in and not know what people from our product.
Sorry, our company almost said the name our company. Are accessing their systems. Anytime there's access to their systems. That's not encrypted. There must be a complete like knowledge and acceptance from the customer that's allowed. And so like it's the for the alpha program. We made a business trade off to say, do we make a feature right now where we give them the ability to grant us access?
We're like, no, we're not going to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to provide that are back to say that shall not enter. And our policy is that the [00:15:00] account manager that creates the org, which right now is me and does the onboarding, which is me right now is in the org. And so during that period of time, the client sees that I have access to the org and then they can revoke that access if they'd like to.
But that's just another example of these things might seem little and small, but they really matter. And if you're not thinking about it at the beginning, like it's just difficult to come back later and say now we're going to do all these things.
Kayla: That's building trust from the beginning.
And it's funny, cause I'm reading a book right now, not a promotion for it, but it is a good book that I'm reading. It's called the power of trust, how companies build it, lose it, regain it. If you haven't read it, I do recommend. That you read it because it starts with, the Tylenol story from the eighties that we've all heard of before, but you're, but going back to what you were just saying, you're building that trust in inherently into the product.
And then your alpha customers are now experiencing that Oh, they thought about this. I didn't even think about that. They thought about this [00:16:00] already. And that is an automatic tick in the box. And is such a big part of a success for any organization at any stage. I think that's brilliant.
Adrianna: Yeah. I've also one more thing on this and I promise I'll move off this topic. Excited. So back to The word culture is just so important. I think Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? And so back to my story of suddenly some of the devs were like, I can't get in here.
And then it was just like there that's intentional. Two things happened. First was like, they just accepted it. There was not pushback, right? And that was because that was the culture we had. And the second thing was we better make sure that our metrics are really good so we can see what's going on, right?
Because that visibility is actually very important. And so if the developers want to see something, they are inclined to focus on that area of metrics and everything like that. And So that's an example of another area where the business trade off could be like no, we'll just let people in.
And now we don't [00:17:00] do all this other work. And it's Oh, don't that's just security tech debt. Don't yes.
Kayla: But it ties into this compliance. Mindset that you've been security mindset. I say compliance because I'm going to focus solely on how that ties into your controls for a sock to audit your access management that goes into sock to PCI ISO 27, 000 series.
Cause there is a privacy series. There will eventually probably be an AI tie into that as well. Nevermind the AI regulations that are coming out of Europe, which have higher fines. For when compared to GDPR, which everyone thought that was outrageous, we just wait, right? So access management and security controls like that kind of go along with it and expand out into these SOC two and PCI ISO programs underpin these behemoth regulations that are coming out of the EU right now that are focused on these things.
So that alone is going to save again, resources and time down the road. And it's just, [00:18:00] Can't see it now, but it's going to pay off in the long run.
Adrianna: Yeah, absolutely. Can't agree with you more.
Taylor: I think I love the fact that you said, like the developers just accepted it and moved on because again, like we're talking about culture, but it really hits on, the trust of the hiring process that you guys went through that feeds directly into the culture that you're trying to build.
Because I know we've all been at places where it's like, Oh, my developer has to have access because, they just, they have to see it live themselves. And if you're taking. If you're allowing them to make informed decisions without being exposed to the customer it allows them to D segment the idea in which they think it's operating in the way that the customer is actually interacting with your product.
So I think that there's a lot of nuance there that, hiring the right people, putting the right [00:19:00] controls in place, allows you to actually scale faster. And better understand your customers than what you intended the product to do. My favorite saying is customers are going to customer. If you give them the option or the ability or the availability to do something, whether you think they're going to do it or not.
They're going to do it.
Adrianna: Yeah. I, we actually had that conversation multiple times like with our team, right? Like we, you cannot control the customers. Like one of our values is we treat our customers like guests. And so it's really the understand that if you're treating someone as a guest, that means that if they come and tell you that there's something wrong, you are not immediately going to turn it back on them and blame them for it.
Like you are going to lean in. With intention to seek understanding and go from there. And so it's not just that it's the what do you, what would you feel? Like, how do you feel the customer would feel if they knew or suspected that somebody was able to get into their [00:20:00] organization that they don't know about?
And by the way, that organization has access to their code. This is their code, so I'm not going to go into the details of what my company does, but anytime you're talking about doing something interesting with a company's code base, you better have great security and privacy settings just, and policy.
And, oh! Documentation, guys, would never from a startup person, but I'm going to say it is that documentation is actually part of the lifeblood of our culture. And it's so important. Like people do not want to take the couple minutes to write something down, but it pays dividends. And it's also So critical for the foundation of being able to go for those compliance.
It's like for us. Oh yes. And so back to hiring, you got to hire people that like, yeah, security is important and are willing to write things down. And I know that engineers just want to engineer, but part of the job is also writing down what you're doing.
Taylor: Yes, [00:21:00] absolutely. You hit on one part of it.
And Kayla's kind of started going down that way as well as like when you start talking about AI and there's all of these, pending regulations and, governmental controls coming down on who can access AI, what can AI be used for how much data is actually feeding the interpretation of the LLMs to that are generating responses.
There's a part. Where, there's an intersection of culture and security that may not get talked about a lot, but, ethics and making sure that, you're ethically approaching and have ethical considerations for artificial intelligence development and use within your organization.
So we understand like. How you're building secure by design, but how are you guys taking ethics into consideration to make sure that, as you are secure by design or you're using AI, that you're doing it in a way that's not going to put you in a position that's unethically compromising
Adrianna: Honestly, I could talk at length [00:22:00] on this topic.
Fun fact, there's a bit of, EU AI act stuff that I learned as soon as my startup started. So I probably know more than the average AI startup owner when it comes to all of that. And so talking about AI in context of security and making choices and things like that, you mentioned LLM.
So LLMs are freaking all the range right now in the AI space. Chat GPT came out and it was like, boom, everything changed overnight. And then you have all these startups that are also trying to chase that to say, okay how do I use this LLM to make this use case better? All that kind of stuff.
stuff. And you know what, even though we were founded before that, and we were like AI focused, we also said, wait, how can we utilize LLMs for good? And we do I'm not giving away secret sauce to say one of the, one of the services that we utilize as an LLM, what happened as soon as we made that decision?
We're like, okay what are the security considerations here? What are the security considerations here? Actually read [00:23:00] line by line for terms and conditions of chat GPT versus Gemini versus whatever you got to get into those details. So we did a whole bunch of POCs on chat GPT at the very beginning, because like, why not, but as soon as we started productizing.
As soon as we started productizing, we were like, that's not for us. Like it, there is no hard clad, like iron clad. That's the right word. There's no iron clad kind of commitment from them not to use the data that customers put into it to Be part of their training models or have that information somehow be leaked to someone else.
Like you have to have the LM designed in a way to prevent that stuff. So we ended up going with another service that I won't name. Because I don't want to be like, Hey, I'm promoting this one versus that one. But the main reason that we chose the LLM that we did was because of their privacy settings and their top record with enterprise class security.
[00:24:00] And we said, okay, like this is, basically the only LLM in the market that we feel like we could build around that meets our security and privacy conditions. And as that being a big value of our company, it clearly drove that strategic choice.
Kayla: Now, you mentioned obviously about the security and the compliance and the confidentiality aspect of course.
But what about integrity? Integrity is an often overlooked portion of the CIA triad, as they say, in security, right? So the integrity of the information that's getting put in will help, with the information coming. I was going to say like bad in, bad out, but in this case, it is a big portion of a concern that a lot of people have around AI models.
Is that a consideration that you've thought of along the way?
Adrianna: Yeah, oh, just the, yeah, in and out for sure. Again, back to it's funny, now that we're talking about it, the number of times that a strategic [00:25:00] conversation starts off with from the security perspective, I'm just having it, coming to my head like over and over again.
So cause one of, one of the things that we immediately talked about was how do we maintain the integrity of the data for an organization? Because like our product is for companies. It's not for an individual users for me and they're like that data that they're Entering in to get the answers is really important.
And how you treat that is also really critical. And everyone knows that if you start using some LLMs you need to be concerned. And so one of the first things that we said was like, what if we have a bad actor? What if you have a bad actor that wants to screw up with your screw up the data that you're putting into the LLM to basically compromise your entire system.
And if people are making decisions based off the answers that are coming back that's not good. That's bad. So how do we look at how do we look at that use case? How do we look at other use cases? How do we make sure that that people in addition to the products are having essentially the right [00:26:00] approach?
Kayla: Yeah, that's really interesting. Like so many things just popped into my head as you were talking. Every time I talk to you though, I feel like something, something new has popped up and has come into my mind. We'll have to have you on. again for another episode. And as you continue down your journey let's bookmark that like right now, Taylor.
Adrianna: So we don't
Kayla: forget.
Adrianna: I actually never answered the other question that you asked, though. I got just so excited about talking about security and things like that but one of the things you actually asked is I am a woman and, What does that mean being a founder as a woman?
And what kind of challenges do you have? And I, it's one of the most amazing things to be honest with you is that it's so much easier than just being a woman in the executive team. I feel like. I don't think anyone would expect me to say that. And I'm not trying to say that it's easy to be a female founder.
It is not. But people often overlook how difficult it is to [00:27:00] be a female leader in an organization. Somebody that has a VP level title, somebody that has a C level title. The founder title immediately provides credibility that somebody wanted to invest money in you and did the due diligence on you.
And so what I found is that when, while I've been in leadership and executive roles for a little while, I don't have to start over from scratch every time to, to prove my competency. Like it's, I'm just expected to be competent.
And it, it doesn't matter under what circumstance you always have to immediately prove yourself in like even the most small ways. And it's a load off my shoulder to say I don't as much. And so that, that challenge the challenges that I do feel now that I'm a founder that's completely different than my experience as the executive team is just that I just feel so alone.
I don't [00:28:00] know how to explain it. Cause I, I have plenty of friends. Kayla is a great example. You're a great example. Like you are an example of a female awesome CISO, right? And we're friends. And that means we have support for one another as a female founder. I don't have anybody else that actually know that's a female founder.
Kayla: Yeah. And it's different. You and I talk often about challenges and what's going on in the industry and things like that, but. Yeah, it is. It's very different because I don't know what it's like to be a founder and be talking to people who could be investing in me who, are who's out there trying to decide whether or not that this is a good move for them and how to sell in that manner.
So it's a very different challenge set that you're going through versus What I'm experiencing as an executive at a company. So it's a different scenario for you, for sure.
Adrianna: And I will say, I try to go to a lot of events, a lot of founder events. [00:29:00] And when I'm at events that are VC heavy I'm usually like the only female founder or one of the only female founders.
I'll tell you, there was an event that I went to. I'll just say sometime last year. And the people that were checking me in to get my name tag, um, They were taking a little bit of time and somebody came up and I started talking to them or whatnot and then I got the name tag and they're like, Oh, I thought you were like an admin.
You're the,
Kayla: That's happened to me before too. That is so aggravating. I am so sorry that happened to you. That is incredibly aggravating.
Adrianna: Wow. Yeah. And actually it wasn't the only time that night because I was the only female founder at the entire event. And so there were VCs that would come up and because there was a mingling of founders and VCs.
So I had VCs coming up and talking to me. I had other founders coming up and talking to me and I know I [00:30:00] just went on this little thing about Hey, it's easier than being, and I, and just a leader a female leader executive at a normal company over and over again. I had people. honestly surprised with shock on their face when they found out that no, I was actually the co founder of the company.
Like it was like, they went from being a little bit confused about why I was there. To being like Oh, okay, cool. That's great. And you know what? The great thing is you can use that because then that makes them uncomfortable and you just lean into it. And be like yeah. Like I can talk the talk and I'm here.
So this is where I should be and where a lot of other women should be too.
Kayla: Absolutely. And speaking of that, like mindedness how do you find the right balance of like minded entrepreneurs and people that challenge you to do the right thing, like in your network?
I know you just said you, you go to a lot of events. Do you find that the security first mindset that you have? Is something that's out there that you're able to find people who are like [00:31:00] that? Are you're smiling? Someone to say, I
Adrianna: would say that it is by far not a dime a dozen folks. It actually, it's so interesting.
I've been in security for that. When I go to events, I'm with other people that are from security, right? Like I'm like with other people that care, that have the same perspective that, that are going to make trade offs and business decisions with that in mind. And that is no longer the case for me, right?
Just because there's the combination of when you're a founder, you end up going to a lot of events that there's very multidisciplinary for what's the different types of things you can do. And so that means that I'm getting exposure to very competent, very High performing individuals that have done extremely well in their career that have no idea about like the basics of things that you need to have in place.
And it was especially when we focus on compliance. [00:32:00] So we are an AI company, the EU AI Act being an extremely important regulation coming out of Europe that has been passed. That, that was something that we set up, set up for to understand. There has now been since that development really happened, there's been more on the U S UK and Japan side and all that kind of stuff.
So it's definitely something to talk about. And. It's funny that when I go and I talk to other AI people that they have literally no idea that first there even is a regulation. And then I'm like, how did you miss it? There's like, it's all over the place. The people went to the Senate, and we're talking about this stuff. All right. So first is people don't even know. And then second, It's like they don't want to know. They want to be like, I'll figure it out later. Who really wants to figure it out first? And so you, I very quickly could weed out the people that have any kind of security mindset by asking them about how are they [00:33:00] making sure that what are they thinking about for on the AI compliance side?
And they're just like, what? But then sometimes you find someone that's just I leaned into it. And then when you find those people, you're like, I'm going to grab I'm going to grab you and I'm not going to let you go. We're going to become friends and we're going to have friends and confidence that we can talk to each other about this.
And we can bad ideas around. And you can tell me when I'm being stupid, right? That's what
Kayla: networking is, right? That's exactly what it is. Cause if something comes up for you. then they're probably having the same challenge or at least have heard of that challenge. And then you can network together and you have a group of experts that you can rely on, especially with AI being so new.
I think that's really cool. Yeah I've been following the regulations and things like that, not as intently as you have, but for someone to have never heard of them before is, Shocking. Cause again, tying into like security and everything like AI, everyone's always worried about like security and things like that, of course.
But this is a big deal. This is a brand new technology. [00:34:00] It's moving extremely fast. Like you can't even blink. And it's just, you have to stay on top of all of the chaos. And obviously you do that with networking, but is there anything else that you do to help stay on top of. Of the ever changing landscape that seems to be changing every time you blink.
So
Adrianna: there's the, I'll just make the comment that I never really understood networking became, before I became a real, like a founder, like I never really got it. I always thought of networking as a thing you go to events and like you meet people and they know you and you know them. But now I very much am like I have no patience for the small talk, right?
Like I want to see who in the room I can be that I want to be friends with that also knows about something that I want to know or is like minded in an area because back to trust you have to trust this other person and as a founder and when talking security like I just It's all [00:35:00] about actually friends now like you like networking events give you an opportunity to find friends And then it's the like you need to find a friend because you The people you surround yourself with, you can choose to have people you surround yourself with that make you better.
And you can have people that you surround yourself with that just make you feel good. And I definitely want the first one. I want to be better. So I just want to mention that about networking. A couple other things that I do is And I want to give props. I'm not going to, I'm not going to name the drop names, but one of our VCs is really big on the community.
So they have over 400 portfolio companies and a portion of their portfolio is focused on AI. And a portion of their portfolio is focused on security. And I have very much leaned into becoming friends with those other founders, right? Like the other founders that are in AI, and then we will have conversed we'll have basically community [00:36:00] conversations and webinars and things like that.
And just basically chats like we're having now where we're like, I'm having this problem. How are you handling it? So it's a different level of networking because they're not like my friends per se, but there are people that I trust. And there, it feels safe to go to them, especially again, I keep saying early stage startup is in stealth mode.
You're so afraid that someone's going to take your idea. And so that's challenging. It's a founder's club. Yeah, I guess you're right. It's the founders club. They
Taylor: have their own special jackets and everything.
Adrianna: Oh man. I want a jacket. Yeah. I'm like, yeah. Okay. What's that happening?
I'm
Taylor: there to be fair. You both live in the Northeast, so you always need a jacket.
Adrianna: That's
Taylor: because it's either the wind or it's the snow.
Adrianna: Yeah.
Taylor: So yeah, we should work on that. We should work on jackets.
Adrianna: I like this. I like it. And then it'd be like, like something that's if someone likes your jacket, they're like you, you're like, ah, like you care about security.
That's not a nuisance to you. [00:37:00] That's something that you find exciting. But in terms of other ways of keeping up to it I will, again, I will not drop names. But being on a podcast I will say that podcasts, Are fantastic for keeping up to date on what's going on in the industry.
I listen to several different podcasts every single week and it just keeps me on my toes, right? It's like this is the,
Kayla: including this one. Oh, she listens to this one. Hey. As soon as it drops.
Adrianna: I am listening
Kayla: to
Adrianna: this project
Kayla: and that's just because I text message and they go oh, look, it's out.
Adrianna: I'm listening to a choppin my vegetables, driving the car. No yes. She
Taylor: actually stops her founders meetings to listen to our podcast.
Adrianna: Pretty much, yeah. Wait a second. I got some security folks that are like minded. I need to go listen to what they just said, because what they said is awesome.
But yeah, so podcasts I'm a huge fan of podcasts and. Then it's just also just seeing what's going on the news like the podcasts [00:38:00] are great because it's people have decided to take information and try to Push it out there And so they'll usually take multiple sources and then have a spin on it, right?
Like they have an idea they have a theory and so so I love about podcasts The news, the thing that I follow in the news is when I actually see it come up. If it comes up in the news, you know it's a big deal, right? And every morning when I'm on my phone looking at the headlines for the day the first headline that I'll always click on is if it has a hint related to security or AI.
I'm there for it it's anything. Because It's something that people don't like talking about. So if it gets to that level of national attention you should know about it.
Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. The news is both very informative and very scary at times. I unfortunately like naturally gravitate to opening up, CNN [00:39:00] tech or, Dark reading.
Kayla: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah. Tech crunch, like any of those things. And like whenever I open up my phone and open up Google, you I don't know if you guys notice like the news articles related to like your searches that populate down below. It's it's nothing but, tech and video games and football for me.
And it's oh, yeah, I like I'll read that one later. And I probably have 38 open cash tabs in Google Chrome on my phone.
Like different open source tools or updates to frameworks or updates to policies and guidance. So I think that, podcasts and news is like even with the state of how cybersecurity is not only being looked at, but at oftentimes As a culture, we are being targeted to be better than the rest of everyone else.
Whereas like other, global types of [00:40:00] organizations like sales orgs and, product orgs and customer success orgs, and, all of these other areas and functions, you might hear of a bad, stock incident, right? And it's Oh no, but it's not 1999 anymore.
It's like stock markets out, stock markets down. But then there's news of this CISO is now being called in from department of justice. And they're talking about holding him personally accountable. And, Human fines, not organizational fines, but human fines. And it's there's almost no room for error at times because we have to be much, that much better because of the intricacies in which we work in.
So that's that's why I try and balance the news as much as possible because, every other day it's like, Oh, security incident. And then, there's always like the ambulance chasing to the Moab article mother of all breaches, which was just a combination of a lot of other breach files and everything that came out.
I think it was, I think it was like 73 million [00:41:00] records that was reported. It's Oh, okay. Like I'm desensitized to that now. But then it's yes this, fortune 50 company see, so is, in front of Whatever, judicial committee, like having to testify on his internal security policy that he inherited from a previous, security leader.
So it's very interesting that a lot of people still focus on the news, the scary as it is.
Adrianna: No, it's a really good point. It's actually I wish I had made that point even though I do try to follow the headlines so I am aware of them. It's a big part of why I focus on the podcasts because it's already been filtered, right?
And I am selective about which podcasts I listen to such as this amazing podcast because Like I, I care about who the podcasters are, like if that pot, like the podcasters need to have credibility for me to be listening to them. Such as you two, like you guys have real credibility. You've walked the walk.
And in addition to talk the talk it's not about publicity. It's about this is [00:42:00] who you are. But yeah. So for me the podcast helped eliminate some of the noise. Because if I hear the same thing from three different podcasts in the same week then that's something that I've prioritized putting into my memory banks, right?
And also, just to be like a personal, honest thing is, I listen to things a lot more than I read them, because I feel like if I'm sitting down reading something, I'm not getting enough things done, so I listen to things while I'm doing other work or whether it's cooking, cleaning, or there'll be some times that literally the work I'm doing is, can sometimes be like, You don't need your whole brain for it, and that's when I'm gonna start listening to things.
Yeah, sorry. That one hit close to home.
Taylor: I was like, wow that hurt.
Kayla: I know, I think, I just want to point out, Taylor, you talked about like gaming and stuff just really briefly. Adriana is drinking out of a Pax. I'm glad I could see it from last year. That made me smile when I saw it [00:43:00] come into the shot. So I know we're running out of time here. Adriana, thank you so much for meeting with us.
Do you have any, words of wisdom or Advice that you'd like to pass on to anyone who's thinking of starting a company of their own, male, female, other doesn't matter. I think that's a moot point these days. Leading women like you that have led the charge here for us.
But anything you'd like to add as like your final words?
Adrianna: Yeah, if you're thinking about starting a company, it means you're ready to start a company. It doesn't really matter how many years experience you have in a particular area. If you are just like, my passion, I'm really considering like this company or you're like me.
I hadn't been considering a particular idea. I was just like, this is something that I want to go do. And I was so fortunate that I had people around me. Say no, you really are ready. And the truth is once I started doing it, I was just like, Oh . I'm so ready for this. So I go back to the very first thing that I said at the beginning is like, [00:44:00] why not?
You. Why not? Just go forth and do it. Believe in yourself. Because if you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.
Kayla: Yeah, I think that's great because we often hear people talking about imposter syndrome and not feeling that they're in, they're ready to be in the room that they're in. But sometimes just say yes and rock it, figure out as you go, and if you're ready, give her, if you're thinking about it, then you're ready, and I love that.
Thank you so much for your time today, Adriana, we really appreciate it. And can't wait to talk to you again. Of course, this is, that time just flew by. I can't even believe it.
Adrianna: So now I'm actually on the podcast. This is crazy. No, so happy to be here. Thank you two so much for inviting me. Thank you.
Taylor: Really appreciate it.