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CyberWire Daily
Julian Waits: Find a way to help society. [Serial Entrepreneur] [Career Notes]
00:11:04
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You're listening to the Cyberwire network. Powered by N2K, the DMV has established itself as a top tier player in the global cyber industry. DMV Rising is the premier event for cyber leaders and innovators to engage in meaningful discussions and celebrate the innovation happening in and around the Washington D.C. area. Join us on Thursday, September 18th to connect with the leading minds shaping our field and experience firsthand why the Washington D.C. region is the beating heart of cyber innovation. Visit DMVRising.com to secure your spot. And now a word from our sponsor, ThreatLocker, the powerful zero trust enterprise solution that stops ransomware in its tracks. Allowlisting is a deny by default software that makes application control simple and fast. Ring Fencing is an application containment strategy ensuring apps can only access the files, registry keys, network resources and other applications they truly need to function. Shut out cybercriminals with world class endpoint protection from Threat Locker.
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My name is Julian Waite and I'm the Senior Vice President and Executive in residence with Ravta 7 as well as the chairman for cybersity. When I was a kid and I grew up in the era of the Justice League and Superman and there and I always wanted to do something where I could find a way to help society, to basically help others, protect others. I always thought that was going to be a military career or something like that. Didn't work out, but that was my assumption as a child. I was for a while a Baptist minister and I was very much into music, being from New Orleans, Louisiana, jazz and gospel was my thing, and so I thought I was going to be like a church musician and a minister. As I was leaving high school, going to college, and I also got married early, it occurred to me that to be a professional musician I probably needed to be a little good. And it became incredibly obvious to me that I was never going to be a professional musician and I need to figure something else out. I always had a knack for math and science and so took a few classes at Loyola and some classes that were very important at Xavier University in New Orleans, which basically changed the trajectory of my life. And that was when I developed an interest in computer technology in terms of my actual career. My real start started at Texaco and it was specifically Texaco in New Orleans. I started in the computer operations department, rolling up plots that were printing off of very large machines that petroleum engineers were developing for. You know, here's where we should go put a well or explore if a well could be here. And the sneaking reason I also did it is. I took the night shift and I could practice on my saxophone at night without bothering anybody once my work obligations were done, say five, six hours into it. But then I developed a love for doing maintenance programming on Digital Equipment Corporation VAX mainframes and turned into digital command language, turned into Pascal, turned into C. And next thing you know I was a maintenance programmer working in the computer department in Texaco. I was the first person to run the networks, computer networks. So this was right when personal computers were introduced into corporate environments and we had these things everywhere and nobody could figure out how you were supposed to connect them up together. They gave me some training and all this other stuff and I became a Banyan Network certified engineer. That then led to me moving on to Compaq Computer Corporation, now hp. I was like a kid in a candy store. I went into his systems engineering group where it was really the convergence of hardware, operating systems from an endpoint perspective and network operating systems. And they paid for all the training I could get. They helped me learn better coding skills. I just really blossomed there. And then I realized at some point there was this thing called add, which I live with every day and put me in a position where I hated coding. I wanted to be out talking to people and working with people. And then compact gave me the opportunity to start doing pre sales type stuff as well. And that was when I found my first passion for back to the protection thing. We talked about earlier, being able to provide people with computers in a secure fashion to help them do things and protect their assets at the same time. There wasn't even a thing called of course, cyber security. If people used the word cyber back then, that just meant it was digital. Had nothing to do with security. But even back then security was a concern, especially when it came to compliance. I moved to Washington D.C. primarily because I wanted to be in an environment that was highly diverse. You go to Boston and let's just say everybody all looked the same. But the high Tech scene in D.C. baltimore, Northern Virginia area was very diverse and I really liked that. And that's when I became a first time CEO. I worked for a company, E Security. I left there and started my first startup called Brabian where I was co founder because I had several. And we raised $10 million in our first round and we were off to the races. I started what I'm doing now, which is serial entrepreneur. I love coming into early stage companies or in the case like I am here at Rapid7 and bringing me into an environment that's very mature but They've got some things that they would like to do that would be more entrepreneurial. And so I'm being given the opportunity to help define what those things are, create a business plan and launch those new businesses from within the company. And I think it's a great fit for both of us. My parents raised me with a desire to always ask why? And understand how something works, starting with the why. The why is always, what's the problem that cybersecurity customers are trying to solve? It's basically, how do I mitigate my risk? And our market is no longer a question of whether you're going to be compromised or not. The question is what's the materiality of it and how fast can I catch it after the fact. But it's also being able to listen and understand what the problems are and then come back with solutions that really make things better rather than making things worse. The first word of wisdom is something that my father used to say, but he didn't create it. You can't be it unless you can see it. Find a mentor in the industry that you're interested in, even if you don't know exactly what it is. Find some people that are doing things that you think are interesting in the area that you're looking for and do your best to try and build a relationship with them or learn as much as you can about them. One bad thing I hate about computer science, coding, even till this day, where the assumption is always that you have to have a demonstrated better than average capability with mathematics before you can actually use a computer. And that's just a fallacy. And then if you look at it and then cyber as a subset, there's still a very low representation of minorities and women in the field are still considered to be math oriented, white male dominated thing. Right now in North America alone there are well over a million job openings in and around the ideal of performing cybersecurity. This is not necessarily cyber analysts or people who do digital forensics. And then the next hurdle is. But that's way too hard. No, it isn't. If I told you how my career started here, you know, early on in the early days and there's so much more information. I mean you can get all the training you need for free on YouTube. When I'm ready to hang up my hat and it's time to move on to that pasture, I hope people look back at my work and what they see first is exactly how I started the conversation that I wanted to help and protect people. And I hope in their lives with everybody that I've ever touched or talked to that they feel in some way that that occurred. And secondarily I hope they can look around themselves and say with the information that was shared with them by me and others in my network that it did allow them to live potentially a better life than potentially would have had going a different route than in cyber or whatever it happens to be.
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SAM.