Transcript
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Hello, my name is satya gupta. I'm the cto at versec system. I grew up in India. My father was a civil servant. And at that time, it was really hard. We had two other siblings. My mother was insisting on that we go to the very best school because education was at a very high premium in our household. There were times when they had to sell some books to be able to meet expenses. It was very clear to me that I had to go and become a doctor or an engineer. And certainly doctor was out of my league because even if I had to go into a biology lab and dissect a frog and all, I'd probably end up fainting before the frog had a knife in its belly and all. So I decided I'd be an engineer. One of the biggest challenges of going into an engineering school in India is to everybody's aspiration is to get into this very famous school called the iit. And because my brother had topped at school, you know, it was pretty much my goal to be able to go and get to that same school. I actually went to higher education in, in the US So from India, I kind of did another master's degree in the University of Massachusetts. And right after that, I went to work for gm. And I quickly realized that I wasn't really cut out to be one of the 700,000 employees that GM had at the time. And I really wanted to do something meaningful, you know, something that allowed me to sort of express myself a whole lot better and solve some really big problem for, you know, the industry. So I kind of quit GM and I went to work for myself. And, you know, there was many ventures that, you know, startups that I actually went through. One last one that I did was really made a huge difference. The big thing that we did out there that in the startup was that, you know, we kind of suddenly use some really cool technology to be able to make a huge change. So Instead of having 1 megabit of bandwidth or 2 megabits of bandwidth, we were up to 100 megabits. And in the case of businesses, up to gigabit of bandwidth. So, you know, that made me think that we have to sort of keep working with things that will change people's lives rather than solving incremental problems. You know, there's no fun in doing that. So. And I had the mental fortitude and the educational background to be able to go look at some really hard problems. One thing that really inspired me at that point in time, you know, it was just a casual sentence that was uttered by a colleague or it stuck in my brain for posterity, I would say. So the colleague said that people rise to their level of incompetence. And that was really a remarkable statement that I heard from that person. You know, you rise to the point where you can actually contribute and when you think that you've are done here, that you cannot contribute anymore, that's where it all ends and all right. But in reality, the sky is the limit. It's almost like a storybook startup scenario. Here I was visiting a colleague who was a professor in the University of Massachusetts. He and I sat down for coffee at a Starbucks. And as we were sitting for this coffee, I realized that there was these big cyber attacks going on. And, you know, it just so happened I opened the conversation with him and saying, hey, did you notice this new cyber attack? And here these big dominant cyber companies at the time who were releasing signatures every 10 minutes and millions of machines were going down over the last few days because of this very nimble attack. It was one of those worm like attacks that was taking machines down by the millions. Something he said struck me as, you know, hey, we are not really looking at root causes out here. We kind of looking at symptoms. You know, every time a new attack happens, we try to figure out what's going on with that particular attack. And it's like, you know, playing a game of Whack a Mole, a new attack shows up, you kind of stomp on that little arcade game, you know, so, you know, every day 350,000 new pieces of malware get created. And we are trying to classify, you know, every piece of malware. And to me, that looked like a big joke out there. At that point in time, you came up with this whole thought process of what I now describe as first principle. I had a couple of meetings with the professor again, and we came up with five or six guiding principle that we call first principle. The very first principle was we must be able to protect an application from being abused, even if it is vulnerable. The second principle was milliseconds matter. The third principle that was involved out there was that vulnerabilities are the key. The fourth principle was that, you know, I shouldn't really expect people to hand me their source code so that I can look at it and be able to figure out where the vulnerabilities are. And the last very important thing was if I look at a server, there are hundreds of proxies out there. I cannot go and say, I can see I'm going to protect only one or two, and I leave the rest to open. It's like saying, hey, in my home there are these five doors, and I'll have a cop standing on door number one. But the other, you know, you're on your own. So those are the five doors. First principle that we said we must adhere to in our solution. And I'm very happy to tell you that, you know, it's been a long, arduous journey. Our customers are now beginning to see that, you know, this is the only way to protect, you know, the vulnerabilities. You have to be able to make sure the vulnerabilities are like that bad lock that you hang on your door that cannot be abused. Even though, you know the lock may give up, you know, you'll still be able to protect, make sure that the doors are strong enough to not give up. And, you know, now more than ever, customers are beginning to see that we are now able to make sure that the application stays within its guardrails and the attacker is not being able to sort of derail the train and make that application do things that they want, Assemble the very best people, be able to leverage their brain power. And that's my style of functioning. You know, we want to be able to have the very best people in the team and also leverage their thinking power and be able to. This is how we, you know, as a collective, we become better. And, you know, it's crazy. You know, as an entrepreneur, you have to be a little bit crazy because, you know, you have to have this dedication to be able to, you know, keep going down, wake up every day, and keep yourself motivated. But it's really fun, too, you know, you have to be able to dream big, and you have to have the fortitude and the mental courage to be able to hold on to that. If you really believe in something, go for it and also dream big. You know, make sure that, you know, you're not solving one problem, but you're solving thing that will make a name for it, you know, which will have things that people will remember. This is how it should be done, you know, accepting the status quo and doing it for, you know, the same way that people have been doing it for the 30 years that may have gone by in the cyber security industry. We see that and by thinking big we are able to make people understand, you know, what, what is different, what is it that's different that we are doing and how their lives will get better. Dream big and work with dedication.
![Satya Gupta: Rising to your contribution. [CTO] [Career Notes] - CyberWire Daily cover](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmegaphone.imgix.net%2Fpodcasts%2F6c1cfc56-c6ed-11f0-a3d7-afe19988c180%2Fimage%2F910aaf148c5fdf3b9f89208a91f19df4.png%3Fixlib%3Drails-4.3.1%26max-w%3D3000%26max-h%3D3000%26fit%3Dcrop%26auto%3Dformat%2Ccompress&w=1920&q=75)