← Revenue Builders
Revenue Builders
The Hard Moments That Build a CEO with Mark Thurmond
01:00:15
Mark Thurmond’s path from sales rep to co-CEO of Tenable was built through consistent execution, difficult operating assignments, and crises that demanded calm before certainty. He explains what the RSA breach taught him about transparency and customer trust, how he and Steve Vintz kept Tenable moving after the death of CEO Amit Yoran, and why the strongest leaders build followership before they need it.
Loading summary
Transcript132 lines
- [00:00]
A
I was with my family and I got a call at 6 in the morning from Steve Benson, from our head of hr, Bridge of Paradise. And they gave me the news, that immediate pass. And a lot of people were like, well, you must have thought that was going to happen. You must have expected 100%. We did not. But you know, you talk about getting into the seat, so you're dealing with that at 6am and then we have to rally because we've got to do emergency board meetings within the next two hours. We have to inform the board, we have to now create documentation and communications for our employees, for our customers. We had to deal with all the Wall street ramifications, right, of changing control and all those things. So you go from this super emotional finding out one of your close friends and boss has passed and literally two and a half hours later you are on board calls, on vacation, putting together all of these very big decisions and all these big critical events that need to cascade out before word got out that he had passed. Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five time CRO John McMahon and Force Management co founder John Kaplan,
- [01:08]
B
the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've
- [01:12]
A
been there, done that and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid.
- [01:23]
B
Most CEOs come up through product or through finance. Today's guest got the job because of how he sells. Mark Thurman is co CEO of Tenable and this is his second time on Revenue Builders. Since we last had Mark on, a lot has changed. In April of 2025, after Tenable's longtime CEO passed away during treatment for cancer, Mark and CFO Steve Vince went to the board together and asked to run the company jointly. And they've been doing it ever since. Splitting responsibility, staying aligned and keeping a public company moving through one of the hardest and most difficult transitions a leadership team could face. He's also been leading Tenable through a bigger shift from the gold standard in vulnerability management to to the leader in something new, exposure management. That's not a rebrand, that's asking a massive install base to buy a platform instead of a product in a category Tenable is trying to define in real time while AI reshapes what customers expect. Today, we're talking about the rep to CEO climb stepping into the seat during an incredibly hard moment. What he learned from mentors like Joe Tucci about influence versus command and control. How he and Steve actually run Tenable together and where he thinks enterprise selling is headed in the AI era. This is Mark Thurman, co CEO of Tenable. So Mark, one of the great things that we love about you is your, is your journey from rep to CEO. It's just an incredible arc. And you know, living that with you over the past, you know, several decades has just been amazing. But when you look back at that arc, are there some moments that, you know, you live through that you recognize them as pivotal but only later?
- [03:31]
A
Yeah, I mean there's a bunch of them, but a few of them and really a couple of them really stick out. I think first and foremost, and you and I have talked a bit about this, is having that opportunity early in the career to have that international experience. Right. So you look at the time I was able to spend in Asia for a few years and then live in Germany and Munich for a couple of years and being able to have a lot of roles where I spend an enormous amount of time overseas. And now as you progress through your career and you go in from rep and then, you know, up to rd, second third line management and then the C COO and now CEO, being able to have an appreciation and understand how international markets work, how cultures are different and how you need to support them and support your people, the different languages, the intricacies that need to happen, say in Asia versus EMEA versus the US versus Latin America. So that I think is a true, very big building block of my career. So that is one. The second one is actually not a good situation. And I think you were around us for a little bit, but when we went through that state sponsored attack from China at rsa, when RSA was really one of the first big cybersecurity companies that was breached in a very sophisticated state sponsored attack to live through that type of situation and really just crisis management and being able to keep the team motivated, being able to communicate with customers, communicate with government agencies, regulators, nsa, FBI, CIA and then the government on how we were communicating and how we were working through our customer base and explaining what was going on and how we would be working with them around two factor authentication and replacing tokens and all of the logistics. And that was a one year process. And arguably you talk to anyone that that went through it through RSA and everyone brings it up as one of the most instrumental times of their career where you truly understood what pressure was, right? But then you rally and you know, as you know, we ended up coming out of that situation growing faster, hitting all the different financial Metrics that we needed to hit within EMC used it as kind of an executive platform that to talk to executives, CIOs and CISOs about what a advanced persistent threat really is and how you need to rally when you are attacked and breached. So that really I like, I use that as my Crisis Management 101. When certain situations in the back of my mind, I'm like, hey man, if you live through that, you can live through anything. And I think that was another big kind of critical event that you could say happened in my career. That's a little bit of a building block.
- [06:15]
B
What was amazing about that was how fast you guys mobilized. I remember Castagnola casting and you got all these people. I think you guys actually brought people into. They lived there.
- [06:27]
C
They did.
- [06:28]
A
We lived there for a few weeks in the beginning. And Joe Tucci, the CEO of emc, pointed at that time the coo, Dave Goulden, to work out of the RSA offices, which he was there 12, 13 hours a day. And we really did. We converted all of our inside sellers into folks that would talk to customers about what took place. You know, we took a lot of our tech support people. They were actually enabled and trained to have customer conversations. You had to have legal, someone from product and someone from sales on every call to make sure you were positioning and explaining exactly what took place. And we did. And I think if you talk to anyone, you know, Cassie being one, but Eric Erstin and Dino Di Marino and Jeff Brooks, the whole crew, it really, every time we get together, we always bring that up as one of the most pivotal times of our lives and in our careers.
- [07:17]
B
So a Fox Foxhole moment is a
- [07:20]
A
big time Fox moment, man. Fox.
- [07:23]
C
A lot of times, though, in the beginning, you know, there's a lot of people that really panic in those situations and there's other people that stay really calm. But a lot of people are really short term thinkers. And the point you're making is you have to have a long term perspective. And if you do and you don't panic and you treat the customers right, it can actually turn out to be a big benefit for you.
- [07:44]
A
Yeah, no, it's an awesome point, John. And that's really what happened, is no one panicked. You know, we all worked insane hours. We all rallied around this mission and vision of how to communicate to customers and explain the situation. And a lot of folks had empathy for the situation we're in. And you know, John, they appreciated the transparency. You know, Art Covello at the time made a very bold mood to go public within a 24 to 48 time period, which was very rare back then. And by, based on that transparency and then the lessons that we learned and what actually took place, people could actually learn, you know, from. It did become public after that. It was China that did the attack, how they got in, how they navigated the network, how they stayed low and slow and, you know, traverse the network laterally. And so lots of lessons to be learned. But then, you know, once we were able to work our way out of the woods a bit, we then were able to have these executive level conversations that actually accelerated our business because we had lived through something that all of our customers wanted to avoid. So it was, it was pretty pivotal. It's something that was something with us.
- [08:45]
B
That was something that I was pretty amazed by as the first of all, I think it was with huge humility that your leadership team, you know, went public with that so early and not having all the answers actually, by the way, because of the way that you guys did business with your customer base. They were, from my memory, they were more open to, hey, we understand that that's gonna happen, that it's probably happening to us as well. What can we do together? And it was, it was really kind of a lesson for me in that if you are open and transparent and, and there's a couple of things that I saw there that you know, that open and, you know, open and transparent and then the, the way that you communicated with the teams, because a lot of times sellers can go south. They're like, oh my God, like I don't, you know, this deal that we have on the table that can go south. And you guys delivered forecast, you, you know, you delivered revenue, you delivered recruiting. And what would you take away from that now from a, you know, from lessons learned from a communication standpoint as it relates to like a sales org, because there's, there's people going through stuff every day right now in these AI companies and in every company, the just the pace of change, the pace of information that's out there. Any lasting lessons that you would give to people.
- [10:18]
A
Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is pretty straightforward and a lot of it is based on being able to control your emotions, being able to be somewhat patient and understand the situation, make very clear decisions and be super specific and explicit on those different action items and those different follow ups. Right. Like the saying we have all the time is don't worry about things you do not control. Like literally move those things off because you can't control them. So what can you control? And that would be our message. And we over communicated, you know, we were talking to sellers three or four times a day and stand up calls at the end of every day, so on and so forth. But I think the way we're able to keep them really motivated is super clean, super simple. Here's the message, here's the playbook, let's go deliver it with humility, but with passion and enthusiasm, knowing that we learned some lessons and we could share that with our customer base and they could benefit from it also. And so I think you tie all those things in there and I think it's transferable to so many different situations, you know, as either reps or first and second line managers start building out their career.
- [11:21]
B
Amazing. I want to talk about this arc a little bit more. Yeah, Airborne Express, Abbott, ptc, emc, rsa, turbonomic, Tenable. You're swinging for the fences. You're, you're going through the rep phases, the leadership phases. You talked about an Asia stint in there. As you're, you got your head down, you've got the, the advantage now being able to look back for people that are listening and they've got their head down and like navigating opportunities whether to go to Asia or not, or whether to go to Europe or not, or whether to take that, you know, that opportunity or not. What lessons have you learned as you climbed up the ladder? When you look back at those, at those pivotal times of decision making to figure out what's the next company, what's the next opportunity? What advice do you have for the people that are, you know, that are out there listening, wondering, do I have an arc to go from seller to CEO?
- [12:21]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think the one thing when I look back at my career and I talk to folks about my career, the one thing I tell a lot of folks, especially younger folks, is I didn't have this documented plan and documented timeline to become a publicly traded CEO, you know, of a cybersecurity company. It really was. And I think it's one of the things I can do. There's not many things I can do really well. One thing I can do really well is focus and just stay in the moment and know exactly kind of what the mission is, what do I need to be successful, who do I need to work with and communicate and bring, you know, together with me to go achieve the goals. And a lot of the times when I got promoted or when I moved to different roles within different companies and they were always for bigger roles and bigger opportunities. It was because I had executed in some way, shape or form in the past role, whatever it was. And so I tell a lot of people is don't get caught up in saying, I've got to be at this certain level by this certain time period, with this certain salary, with this much equity. I am like, focus on the moment, focus on execution. And if you are one of the number one, number two, number three, or top, you know, 5% performers, opportunities are going to come to you, right? They're going to find you either internally within the company you're at, or externally, you know, folks are going to seek you out. So my advice to everyone, right, that I talk to in my network, and I've got, you know, a couple of kids in college right now playing college sports, and I talked to all their teammates and I just say, stay in the moment, focus on what you need to do, focus on the next play, focus on the next rep. And if you do that right with discipline, you're going to actually end up in a great spot. So those are some of the, the things that I do. I did not map this out to be a CEO of a publicly traded company. It just kind of happened in regard to focused on execution and being with the right people.
- [14:13]
B
I love that. You know, basically in the, in the statement that you made, it all bring. It all starts with performance. So even think about a career or trajectory, an arc like yours, you have to perform if you want the next job. You know, there are ways to act like you already have it. One of the ways you can act like you already have it is to outperform the job, the current job that you're in. And I, that can't get lost in any of the messaging that we do. You performed at every single level. The other thing you did, and whether you did it consciously or not, you were not only performing, but you were gathering followers. Like, when I think about all those places where you move, Johnny's a great example of that. Well, is that you are gathering followers. Are you aware of that as you're going through your career, or how does that play out?
- [15:04]
A
Yeah, it plays out, you know, well, a, you get to see the result when you do make a move or you do go to another company. You know, you can actually very simply look at all the different people that you would want to reach out to, that you would want to communicate and you would want to work with again. And as I made these different moves, you know, there would always be a core group of people that I would reach out to and Say, hey, listen, I've got this opportunity. I think it's going to be great. Let me kind of walk you through it. But then I really flip it to them and say, here's why I think it's great for you. Right? Here's why I think this is going to be an amazing opportunity for you and your career. Right. And when you're able to look at these opportunities, evaluate them correctly, and then be able to build your team and have your following, you know, to me, that's a great sign of a phenomenal leader. You know, we all know this. It's super basic. But, you know, one of the biggest telltales of hiring the wrong person is, is once they've been in the seat for three, six, nine months, they don't have anyone from their past companies that have joined them. You know, that to me is like a massive red flag. Like we might have hired the wrong person if they don't do that. Right. We've got examples. You know, we just actually just brought in Dino Di Marino as our new CRO.
- [16:14]
B
Congratulations. Yeah.
- [16:15]
A
Total rock star. But you look at Dino being on board 120 days, he's already brought in four or five people from his network. Right. A lot of the folks that we brought on board and retooled, our executive staff have all brought in people, whether it's in product, whether it's in finance, whether it's in human resources. That, to me, is one of the biggest telltales of a phenomenal leader. And all you got to do is look at John McMahon right there and look at all the companies that he's been involved in and all the different people that follow John, whether he's on the board or whether he was running it day to day, you know, that's it. That, to me, is one of the biggest things for a phenomenal leader. As a. As a grade.
- [16:51]
C
What I wanted to add to what Mark was saying is, like, for me, and, and some of it's built into what he's saying is you have to put yourself in learning and developing situations constantly. It's the times when I've left companies is when I feel like I'm not growing anymore.
- [17:09]
A
Yeah.
- [17:09]
C
When I'm not growing, I get. I kind of get bored. And in a funny way, I like to put myself in situations where. Uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable.
- [17:21]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [17:22]
C
And that's where the growth is. That's where the. As Johnny, as you always say, the learning is in the struggle. That's where the learning is. That's where the struggle is. That's where you have to learn how to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations. Because that's where you grow.
- [17:36]
A
Without a doubt.
- [17:37]
C
Thing too is everybody always asks me like, who's, who's your mentor? I'm like, I don't really have a mentor. Like everybody to me is a mentor. So no matter what level they ever were at or who they were, I was always listening to what they said and if they said something or they had a certain skill set, I always thought, wow, that's really interesting. Like I need to incorporate that into what I do. So think of the fact that you can always learn from everybody around you if you have that mindset and that developing mindset for what Mark said is that's what's going to get you to the next level. And you know, Mark, you know, with the Internet going international and dealing with the crisis, those were all learning and developing situations. He didn't run away from them. He was very tried to be as uncomfortable as possible.
- [18:30]
A
No question.
- [18:31]
C
Comfortable.
- [18:32]
A
Yeah.
- [18:32]
C
And you look at what he's saying. So I want to just, you know, add some.
- [18:36]
A
I, I think it's an awesome point, John. And if you look at, you know, just use myself as the example. You look at some of those roles I ended up moving into, you know, coming out of EMC after 15 years, you know, they were chief operating officer type roles, right? Well, really at emc it was such a machine. I was really, even though general manager titles and things like that where I'd learned different aspects of the business. You know, when I left EMC and then went to Click, it was running professional services and you know, running all the renewals business and involved in tech support and then going to turbonomic as a COO with even more role responsibility with marketing and then, you know, going to a public company as a COO right now, learning how the, you know, the street and being able to work with Wall street, work with all of the different folks that you need to work with in a publicly traded company. Every one of those moves, it was a really big challenge. But that honestly, you know, the money was second. It's like if I can learn something and I can benefit and I think I can impact this org a little bit. That was always the compelling reason for me to kind of make those jumps. And there were with people, you know, especially in when the turbonomic and with tenable folks that I knew, right. And a network that I knew.
- [19:44]
B
So I want to just summarize a couple of things that I heard from both of you which I think are really, really important. You have to have performance to even have any kind of arc at all. So if you're not performing right now, focus more on performance than the arc of trajectory of your career. Focus on performing where you're at and being, you know, making a name for yourself that way. Also building, you know, I think it is a big red flag when leaders, you won't have an arc like this if you do not. If you have not built a relationships and a communication path and style that would get others to want to join you and follow you just like they would show up in a crisis like you guys had early on in that RSA situation. And then the other thing is what I really have been most impressed about you, Mark, is the number of years that I've known you. Invariably I talk to you at least once a year where you will ask me a question for feedback.
- [20:51]
C
Yeah.
- [20:51]
B
You'll say, hey, based upon what we're talking about, how do you think we're doing against that or XYZ or abc? And you're constantly, I've never talked to you where you thought like you had it all, you got it all buttoned up and you got it written down and it's. You just run on a playbook. That's always been something I've always been most impressed with.
- [21:13]
C
With you think you got it all locked up and you all the knowledge in the world or in sales or in sales operations, you're done.
- [21:20]
A
You're done.
- [21:20]
C
Everybody realizes at that moment you're a dinosaur. Now it's only a matter of time before they find a way to get you out 100%.
- [21:28]
A
It is one of the biggest things I always, you know, whether I'm talking to my marketing director, I'm talking to our cmo, I'm talking to our product people, I'm talking to our renewals team, I always ask how do we benchmark against the competition? Who is first in class and how are we competing and how are we going against them? I always want that third party validation and I want that stack ranking because to me simplistically, right. There's all sorts of creative ways to get better. But if there is a playbook and it's all about execution and you can learn something, not that you're going to take every single step because that might not work for your company, but if there are people that are out there doing it, understanding how they do it, how you compare what you can benefit from, that to me is like a calling card. You know, you can talk to My people. And they could say, Thurman is always asking, how does this compare against our competition? And how does this compare against folks that are doing it? World class.
- [22:23]
C
I want to add one other thing that Mark said before with, because a lot of people, especially these days, younger people, think they need to get promoted really quick. And they're quick to, to grab onto a position, quick to grab on to money, but not quick to grab on to opportunity. So I get calls all the time from people that been around and they'll label out, you know, a couple different opportunities that they're looking. They'll name. They'll name a company where they got the better title and more money and more stock. But when they tell you about the situation and they know it's going nowhere, it's literally going nowhere.
- [23:03]
A
Sure.
- [23:03]
C
And then they talk about another one where there's a really good opportunity, the title is less and the money is less, and what do they choose? Even though you tell them you go for the opportunity. Because three years from now, if you work your ass off, you'll be at a much bigger title with more money, working around people you want to work around, you know, with the stock that you want and the company's going somewhere. And then the next place you go, you have a whole bunch of other people you've been around that you can go with. But guess what? They always do. They always choose the position or the money. And then two years later, they call me and say, yeah, John, you were right, I made a mistake. I know, okay, dude, but you lost two years of your life.
- [23:45]
B
Yeah.
- [23:45]
C
You weren't challenged. You didn't learn anything. You took a big title, you didn't work around anybody you really wanted to, you could learn from.
- [23:52]
B
Yeah.
- [23:53]
C
Now you're stuck and you got a big black mark on your resume. Good luck.
- [23:57]
A
Could not agree more, you know. And listen, all I can do, you are 100% accurate. You know, all I can try to do is, you know, use myself as an example. You know, when we were able to sell Click, we got an exit at Click, sold it for about $3 billion. I had a bunch of other opportunities going through that process after we had sold and a bunch of people reached out. Really, really big companies, big publicly traded companies coming in for really big CRO roles and things like that. And I had the opportunity to go as chief operating officer to Turbonomic, which is a Boston based company, and work for a guy, Ben Nye, who probably is one of the smartest humans I've ever met in my life. Mental level, intelligence, unbelievable work ethic and passion and drive. And he was a very well known executive and venture capitalist in Boston. And I'm like, I can learn probably more from Ben than go into any of these other publicly traded companies and learn at running a startup and running all these different functions. And it turned out to be exactly what it was. Learned a ton. Ben did an incredible job getting a $2 billion exit out of Turbonomic and amazing experience. But it was a great example, John, of not going for a bigger title, a bigger company, definitely a bigger OTE and saying to myself, I can probably learn. I haven't been in this environment before because I've always been with kind of bigger, you know, PTC and emc, more larger, well established companies. And you know, it played out pretty well.
- [25:23]
B
Johnny, take us into the, the journey of the CEO.
- [25:29]
C
Well, that's a pretty easy one to do, Cap.
- [25:32]
B
Well Mark, talk to us a little
- [25:34]
C
bit about grabbing that CEO title. Let's talk about maybe the top two biggest things you learned as you sit in that seat.
- [25:41]
B
Yeah.
- [25:42]
C
Because the CRO seat can be pretty lonely seat and now you're in a CEO seat that could be pretty lonely. Like a man on an island.
- [25:50]
B
It is. Before we do that Mark, would you mind just the circumstances are so unique, they're so powerful and I don't think, I don't think our audience really understands like how that solidified itself. But would you kind of take us that a little bit?
- [26:06]
A
Yeah, let me kind of walk you through it because it is super unique and kind of situation we're in right now as a co CEO is unique too. So as a publicly traded company. So you know, the way it happened is I, I came and joined Tenable for there talk about have a following for Amit. You're on.
- [26:21]
C
Right.
- [26:21]
A
Amit was the CEO of Tenable. I worked with him at rsa. It was funny. As you know Cap, we used to butt heads quite a bit. Oh yeah, there's a, there's a lot of mutual respect. And so when the opportunity came up after talking to a meet through a lengthy process, I decided to make the move and became extremely close with the meet.
- [26:36]
C
Right.
- [26:37]
A
Obviously we talk every day. He was one of, he is and was one of these visionary leaders that people talk about to this day. Every time you meet someone that met a meet, they bring up in a Meat story. And so he was truly one of these visionaries within cyber and you know, listen, it's, it's super sad. You know, Meat was, was diagnosed with cancer and by the way, unbelievably healthy individual. He was West Point guy, wrestler, worked out every day cardio, super clean diet, you know, would go in and out of like vegetarian diets and carnivore diets and always experimenting with fitness and nutrition and lived a very, very healthy lifestyle. And Amit was diagnosed with cancer, became interim co CEOs with Steve Vents and we were doing that role for six or seven months and then Amit had a relapse. So same type of situation. And then, you know, Amit passed away at the beginning in January of 2025 and I was on vacation, my family, the year just ended. I was with my family and I got a call at 6 in the morning, you know, from our, from Steve Bentz and from our head of hr, Bridge of Paradise. And they gave me the news that me to pass. And a lot of people were like, well you must have thought that was going to happen. You must have expected 100%. We did not. Every single person at tenable thought of me because he was such a grinder, was going to fight through this. So it was shocking. But you know, you talk about getting into the seat, so you're dealing with that at 6am and then we have to rally because we've got to do emergency board meetings within the next two hours. We have to inform the board, we have to now create, you know, documentation and communications for our employees, for our customers. We had to deal with all the Wall street ramifications, right, of changing control and all those things. So you go from this super emotional, finding out one of your close friends and boss has passed and literally two and a half hours later you are on board calls, on vacation, putting together all of these very big decisions and all these big critical events that need to cascade out before word, you know, got out that he had passed. And so this is, this is one of these things we talk about putting emotions in a certain, you know, part of your personality and compartment within your brain and then focus. And as much as you're grieving, you've got to focus on the mission. You've got to focus. You got 2,000 plus employees, you got 44,000 customers. You have to start executing and just have that switch go automatically on and avoid the brutalness of the situation because you got to run the business and you got to keep this thing moving forward. And so super rare the way it happened, obviously we all love to meet with such passion and enthusiasm. He was a true, true visionary and just an awesome, awesome guy. But Steve and I then as being co CEOs of Tenable, you know, kind of unique. We both were talking to each other, both looked at each other and said, hey, man, you know, We've been co CEOs for six or seven months. We know how to run this business. We've helped build this new exposure management strategy. We can run this together. And neither of us wanted to stay if the new guy came on board and had to retool everything. And neither of us felt that the other one might have deserved it and should have it and one of us would leave. So we actually approached the board. This is kind of unique. We approached the board together and said, hey, we think we can run this business at an unbelievably high level as co CEOs and put a lot of thought into it. What the role, the responsibility, what Steve was going to do, what I was going to do, how would we communicate? And, you know, the board said, let's do this. We think you guys can execute. And we've had a lot of beaten raises since that decision has been made to Wall Street. So we're continuing to execute, staying focused on the mission.
- [30:23]
C
Yeah. So the. Your international experience, your crisis management at RSA, a lot of that stuff came back.
- [30:31]
A
100.
- [30:32]
C
Allowing you to do what you did during that situation, you know, terrible situation.
- [30:36]
A
Yeah. Absolutely brutal. Without a doubt. And those are the things you really look back on. And some of that, John, you don't even realize when you're in it, it feels like it just becomes part of your DNA. It's just kind of who you are now as you've kind of grown in your career, and you just kind of fall right into it, you know, what the right thing is that has to happen. And your execution mindset just kind of overtakes and says, all right, here's what we got to do. Company always comes first. And so what if the company always comes first? What are the things we need to do to execute? And then, you know, put your emotions at the side. Eventually, you know, you got to check into your emotional side and understand and grieve. But, you know, at that time and continuing, we needed to drive the business and make a lot of changes in the business and execute even at a higher level. But that's really where our mindset went, and that's kind of what Steve and I have been able to do as. As co CEOs of tenable. Yeah.
- [31:27]
C
Now let's talk about something that's close to me and. Yeah, I know. Close to you. Talk about whether or not that had A I know you've always been a health nut, a little bit like me.
- [31:39]
A
Yeah.
- [31:39]
C
But talk about whether or not that made you think even more about being healthy and.
- [31:46]
A
Yeah.
- [31:46]
C
And watching what you do in your life with respect to health. Yeah.
- [31:50]
A
No, I love, at first, I love that you actually brought this question up because it did change quite drastically. And as you said, always been into fitness, always been working out, so on, so forth, relatively clean diet, cheat a little bit here and there. But you know, overall fitness has always played a big role. And my mental makeup, Right. Making sure that I'm in a good mental place and making sure I get my workouts done in the morning and when I land into a city, you know, I tell my team if I'm coming in a red eye, I'm working out before I go on my first meeting. So that's always been.
- [32:16]
C
Let's talk about why that's so important, especially as a leader. The reason that's so important as a leader is, is everyone is counting on you to make very good decisions. You're now the co CEO of the company. Yeah. And if you're not in good health, in a good mindset, because you know you came in on a red eye and now you went to work out to clear your head, get the cobwebs out and be in a really good frame of mind, then you can't make good decisions. And you know, we've all seen people that were in leadership positions that slowly lost themselves, they didn't take care of themselves and they ran themselves into the ground. And if you know good for yourself as a leader, then you certainly know good for anybody else.
- [32:54]
A
There is no question about it. And you know this, and Cap knows this too, is a lot of times when you are flying into different countries and all that, you know, your teams have set up meetings that they've been working on for months to try to get you in there.
- [33:07]
C
Right.
- [33:07]
A
Whether it's with an executive, a cio, a C source CEO, whether you're doing press interviews and you're on TV or doing print and making sure you're there, whether you're doing a keynote at a presentation, you know, whatever it is, when you get to kind of that, that, that C level in regards to being a CEO and a CRO and a CEO, the work that goes into these trips is amazing. And your team is counting on you. And so you can never, you know, go into those situations without a clear head, clean body because it's going to allow you to execute better. But going into the situation what was really eye opening. And again, if you talk to any of my friends and even my wife and my kids and anyone in my network and see my employees is I really am focusing and trying to talk to people about longevity and really the proactive nature of medicine and what's going on in this kind of revolution which AI has helped drive, you know, but you look at some of the diagnostic and biomarker tests you can do. You know, we actually, after me passed, we changed our insurance. We now give every single employee a tenable. We give them a $500 subscription to function Health.
- [34:15]
B
Wow.
- [34:16]
A
Which is a very expensive. It's 160 biomarkers. It allows you to look at all these different panels that normal blood channels but don't pick up. So it'll allow you to see if there is something going on internally where you might feel good that you don't see yet. So that's kind of a big thing. The second big thing I talk a lot about is this proactive nature of looking at like full body MRIs and full cat scans, right. Like science has developed. And when you look at how AI has really allowed folks that do these full body MRIs, like Pernovo is a great company that does this. You can go for an hour, do these full body MRIs and you can look at your brain, your heart, your lungs, your kidneys, your liver, look where arthritis might be in your lower back, your knees, your ankles. And it gives you this full diagnostic layout. And by the way, I talk about this so much, my employees have called it the med pick for your body. You guys know how much I love med pick. They're like, Thurman's going to talk about med picking your body. And so this is the proactive nature of it. And so like I look at Amit as the example, right? Unbelievable father, three kids, unbelievable brother. You know, three brothers, great family guy, more money than any human could ever spend in their life. And you know, we lost him way too early. And the thought in the back of my mind always is, man, if Amit maybe had done an MRI or a CAT scan and did it every 12 months and truly understood what was going on, who knows? I don't know whether it have been different or not, but I have definitely become a bit of an evangelist around this stuff. I do a lot of reading, studying, and I, I probably drive a lot of people crazy talking about this a lot, but it was an eye opener. And it is something that, you know, I'm a believer in this escape velocity, you know, around longevity, maybe in the next three to five years, where they could extend life for, you know, 10 or 15 years. And I think you got to be proactive and you've got to, you know, do a lot more pre. Work on your body and understanding what's going on, you know, to, I think, live a long, healthy life.
- [36:08]
C
The other thing too is, you know, you talk about traveling and going to different countries and staying at different hotels. And if you don't make it a priority, then what happens is you can easily fall victim to making excuses as to why you didn't work out that day. Right.
- [36:24]
A
Without a doubt.
- [36:25]
C
When you make it a priority, you find a hotel with a workout area or you find a hotel that's near a river that you can run on or.
- [36:32]
A
Yep.
- [36:33]
C
You know, you find hotels that have some sort of capability for you when you land and get to the hotel to. To work out, clear your head, whether it's yoga, it's Pilates, it's running, it's cycling, it's going to the gym, it's going in the pool, whatever it is.
- [36:49]
A
Yep.
- [36:49]
C
Find a way to go do something for yourself and make yourself a priority before you make every. Everyone else a priority.
- [36:56]
A
Could not agree more. I mean, I preach this to all my people, especially all the executives that do the crazy travel that we all do. It is something, right? And I'm like, listen, there's a difference between motivation and discipline. Motivation can go up and down with cycles. Discipline is. You set it and you do it. It's a behavior, and it becomes a habit that you cannot function without them and you need to be disciplined. And so, like, to me, it's a must. And I just think when you do it, you know, you kind of have. You go do it for, you know, two and a half, three months, that becomes a habit. You know, you can't get along without doing it when you're on the road and other aspects of. Of your fitness, you know, journey and regime. But huge believer in it.
- [37:33]
B
When you say. When you say the med pick part, I was just. We were chuckling about that, but my God, it's so true. Because what I find, even with myself sometimes in the past is maybe some things I just don't want to know. And that's so with me, with my responsibility, with my children, my grandchildren, my. That's not. That's not okay anymore. Like, a lot of people are counting on me. And it. For me, it's more of the mental part of, you know, it's okay not to know, but it's not okay not to be doing anything about it. And I find that the older I get, the more I have to call on my response to whatever I find out. Because the older I get, crap is falling apart, stuff's falling off the wheels.
- [38:26]
C
Sure.
- [38:26]
B
Stuff is going to happen. So nobody gets out of here alive.
- [38:30]
A
Exactly.
- [38:32]
B
It's how you respond to what you have available to you. And the technology that, like my dad, when I think about my parents, the technology that we have, the technology that our children are going to have, it just makes no sense not to find things out because you have an opportunity to do something about it.
- [38:57]
A
Not only do you have an opportunity, you have an opportunity to do it and diagnose it early. I think we all know the situation, right? When you diagnose cancer and that stage one and stage two, the likelihood of living is exponentially higher than when you're in stage three and stage four. And with these new modern technologies like the full body MRIs, and for heart and coronary disease, you know, doing calcium scores and having all this technology, it really doesn't make sense. And I do get pushed back. Right. And I'll use the med pick. Right. It's like a rep not wanting to ask a tough question of a champion or not asking, you know, hey, is there really budget and who's my competition? Because they don't want to get the answer. Yeah, I did the same thing. It's like, well, Thurman, I'm not sure I really want to know. And I'm like, bullshit. You absolutely want to know. Because if you know, you can fight it, you can correct it, you can take all these steps. I said the criminal part of this, the most devastating part, is if you could have had that and you didn't take the opportunity and then you get a certain situation and it might be too late, who knows? Then that is, to me, that's the bad part. That's the sad part. Like science, technology is there today to extend life, to extend quality of life. And it's all about being proactive in your nature and proactive in the different steps that you take. And if you discipline and you do it, just think about this cap. And John, you do this every 12 months, which is now this regime. I've been you really. The likelihood of you getting surprised in 12 months of something that might actually, you know, kill you or give you a significant issue was relatively small because you can see it forming. You can see it happening. And so listen, I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm a big Believer in it. And I really think people on this podcast should be, you know, really self evaluating, making sure they're taking a proactive step to their health. Fitness is critical, in my opinion.
- [40:46]
C
Let's switch gears and talk about how AI might be affecting your business. What do you see in AI? What do you think is coming in AI? How are your sales reps using AI? Yeah, to increase productivity, to learn faster, to get a better grip on customer situations, to resonate better when they walk in with a point of view to the customer. Talk a little bit about what you're seeing and where you think it might be going.
- [41:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, listen, there is no question about it. It is totally become the number one topic within cybersecurity. There is not one meeting that I go on or my team goes on where the CISO or the CIO does not want to talk about what's happening with the Frontier AI labs. They want to talk about glasswing, they want to talk about Mythos, they want to talk about OpenAI strategy. You know, now you've got all the open source players coming into market at a much lower cost. You now are starting to see some of the first attacks where they're leveraging some of these LLMs and the sophistication level that's happening there. So it is omnipresent, right? There is, there is. There is not a discussion. Even if you're going in for a meeting talking about a specific part of your platform, they want to start off with, hey, what's it like partnering with Anthropic? How are you doing with OpenAI? And then let's talk about how this affects our threat landscape, because these CISOs are being asked by their board to make sure that their infrastructure and their cyber controls are in place to prepare for an extremely sophisticated attack by leveraging AI. So it is omnipresent. I think the way we've approached it is we are partnering very, very heavily with Anthropic, for instance, where we are now building Claude into our technology. So we've got Hexa, which is our agentic AI technology that allows you to run on top of Tenable One, our platform, and allows you to go in and change and be able to simplify and be able to modernize your workflows and be able to go in and look at all the different mundane tasks and all the repetitive manual tasks and be able to do it within an agent where you can now speed up time of specific tasks that might have taken you a month or a month and a half. We have Customers now doing some certain things around remediation and around prioritization in minutes and hours compared to weeks and months. And so you're seeing this evolution really happen in front of you. I think the cybersecurity and more broadly, I think the technology sector, specifically SaaS, it's going to be the companies that partner and innovate with some of these models and with their own AI that are going to be able to build value, going to be able to separate themselves and the ones that don't and they say, oh, you know, this really isn't going to happen. This is something that's, you know, going to kind of spin themselves out. They're not going to be real subject matter experts from my domain. I know more about it than these different models. Those are the ones that are at risk if you are not building and innovating and building your code and developing, you know, your solutions with these AI technologies. I truly think you're going to have some issues with. For us at Tenable, we've seen it as an accelerator in regards to our conversations, you know, and what we're seeing in the marketplace right now and the partnerships we've been able to actually build pretty quick, especially with anthropic and open AI, I think are going to pay off, you know, down the road for us.
- [43:55]
C
Where are you seeing that your sales reps are using it the most?
- [43:58]
A
So for sales reps, what we see right now, and I talk to a lot of my peers just like you guys are connected, talk to a lot of folks where we are getting the biggest leverage out of it is really kind of on that back end. So think of things like sales operations, getting quotes done. Think of, you know, how we're analyzing and looking at the historical data around forecasting and trending. Think of enablement, where we're able to go in, record all these sessions, look for certain things using AI, where we can modify and tweak all of our content in real time based on talks, in zoom sessions that we've got going on with customers. That's been a huge area of focus. Being able to go in, especially on pre call planning, you know, that used to take a huge amount of time. You got a big sales call, you're going to five different sources, you're trying to understand what you know the mission statement is for the company. You're going to all of those different things that we're all born and raised on that are still critical. I mean AI automates all that, right? We were able to go in and get These pre call briefings that are just phenomenal and they resonate and as you do more and more of it, as you guys know, you're training your little copilot there every day with you know, 10, 15, 20 different commands. These things are just amazing. And we are seeing really significant productivity gains on the sales side of the house. Especially for the reps that are really kind of thinking as AI, as an enhancement and as a co pilot, they're driving higher levels of productivity, freeing up, you know, non facetime with customers. You know, we want our guys out there doing seven to eight face to face sales calls, doing a 10 to 15 Zoom calls. We've got very high expectations in regard to activity. Being able to free up, you know, 15, 20, 25% of their week by using AI is, is phenomenal. And I think you're going to continue to see those type of massive productivity gains, you know, for years to come. And we're just in the early stages. There's so many more things, you know, that not just tenable, but I think our industry is going to tackle. Using AI, you know, is going to be pretty cool.
- [45:52]
C
A lot of what about employees were, you know, doing a really good job before they went into an account getting the point of view of the cus, bringing a point of view to the customer because they truly did their homework on the customer. And that took a lot of time to your point. Yeah, but now even the lazy sales reps with AI can do that pretty quickly, right? Without a doubt. It used to be maybe 20% of your 25% of your Salesforce going in with a very informed point of view to the customer where they could challenge the customer. And now you know, if you, if they're not using those tools, I mean it's pretty stupid.
- [46:30]
A
And as you know John, because it's not just the reps that you know, doing and you're right, but when you're talking to customers, they are so much more educated when you're meeting with them because they're doing the same thing you're doing right. When you're going on a big meeting and they're doing kind of a summary of tenable and you know, whatever differentiators. What's going on with tenable one, the platform, how is it separating itself from the pack with exposure management? So when you go on these calls, I mean these CISOs and CIOs are wired. They know exactly what the issues and challenges are within the industry. They know what questions they want to ask. And so if you're not doing that legwork and homework, which is pretty damn easy, you are going to be at a significant disadvantage in front of that customer. So without a doubt, yeah.
- [47:11]
B
What about the vulnerability? Like you guys are vulnerability and exposure management and you know, for the last couple of years I've had my eye on the cybersecurity industry and its coexistence and its partnerships in AI. What are some of the things that maybe you could debug or take the mystification out of it of, you know, those companies that are worried about their own vulnerability, their own trade secrets, their own sovereignty when they interact with this world of AI, like what advice do you have for those companies?
- [47:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, listen, it is first off, it's happening and those conversations are actually taking place today. It is still pretty interesting that everyone is still asking the questions and there isn't this 100% clean roadmap and playbook for every company, you know. So a lot of meetings I go on the first 15, 20 minutes is the CISO saying, hey, here's what we're doing with Anthropic, we're now part of Glass Wing. Here's what we saw when we ran it internally, you know, against our code. Here are some of the things, the good things, here are some things that didn't make a lot of sense. What are you seeing? What are your peer group saying? So there's still a lot of that I think, and that will continue to play out, but I think people are getting better and better and those, those questions are getting answered quicker because I do think Anthropic, OpenAI and the other players are responding quicker and giving more insight and they're opening up their aperture where they're now communicating with more customers and being more transparent, working with the government, the US government to open up and communicate better. But I do think you know what you're going to see, especially when you look at customers within cybersecurity. As I kind of said before, you really, to me, the way I view it is looking at like OpenAI. I view them kind of like AWS, GCP and Azure where you have this incredible platform which you don't want to not use it, you want to use it and benefit to help your own business because you don't want to build a bunch of data centers. And so using anthropic or OpenAI or any of these front to AI labs is how do you build that tech into your stack as a platform that is going to allow you to differentiate. And that to me is unbelievably. Critical and important, as I said. And the other thing people got to keep in mind is you can't get caught up in the noise and the misinformation, right? If you just look back like February of this year when these models were announced and every SaaS company on the planet got hammered and they went down 40, 50% and everyone was saying, oh, it's a SaaS apocalypse and these companies are gonna go out of business. And then when you realize and you start explaining and Steve, Vince and myself did a lot of this to Wall street where we would be calling up analysts and saying, hey, let me walk you through why this is a tailwind, why this is going to be a benefit for SAS companies in cyber that actually doing the right things and what's going to happen to this exponential increase of vulnerabilities and how it's going to speed up remediation and looking at attack paths and looking at multiple parts of the attack surface. And then once you started educating, now you've seen this rise over the last few months of all companies across the board, stocks have rebounded. Because I think the analysts, the Wall street community is getting smarter, that these labs are really going to be able to benefit the right type of company that's leveraging their, their technology, leveraging their models. So that's another thing to kind of keep in mind as we go through this.
- [50:35]
B
I think we've heard Johnny, the last several months on asking that very same question, and Mark said this is that I think companies are erring on the side of acceleration, innovation. The ability to innovate and accelerate is so much larger than the risk of some of the other issues out there of somebody taking trade secrets and that kind of stuff. It's still something to be concerned about. But if you're not using it at all because of that, those companies probably won't be around.
- [51:09]
A
I couldn't do more because here's what you got to think about. Cap is the bad guys, especially like in the industry I'm in, cybersecurity might be different for infrastructure and other players, but whatever we do at tenable and with cybersecurity is you have to use this because the bad guys are going to. And by the way, they have no governance committees, they have no data loss, data loss prevention rules, they have no board that they need to report how they're doing. They will use these tools, these technologies, any way they possibly can to get ransomware attacks going, get spread breaches going, you know, and disrupt governments and businesses. And so you have to be on the cutting edge, you have to understand how to leverage it and use it. Have your mindset of how would you know an adversary want to use one of these models or an open source model or something coming out of China, all these different things and it will happen. You're seeing some of the beginning signs over the last few weeks. Some attacks have been reported leveraging some of these AI open source models. So you have to do it. And if you don't do it and you're not with vendors that truly take it seriously the way we do it, Tenable, you know, those companies in my opinion, aren't going to have a great outcome.
- [52:17]
B
Speaking of that SaaS apocalypse, you know, one of the things, you know that I've been so impressed with you and your company is like people talk about creating like category creation. People talk about it and they'll be like, well we're going to move from a product to a platform. But you guys actually did it like and can you just for the. Because everybody's having to do it. Now. What are your words of wisdom for those that are moving from product to platform? The some of the things that you have learned and some of the heads up that you would give to our listeners because people can talk about it but it's pulling it off is another story.
- [53:01]
A
Yeah, no question about it. And you know, we, we've done this transition. You know, people can look at, you know, the last three or four quarters, the percentage of our business now coming from tenable one, which is our platform and it's been pretty phenomenal. And a few kind of lessons I can give really, really quick is one, it is a true company wide initiative. Right. You can't just sit there and be myopically focused on sales and say I'm going to change these two things in sales. No, it is literally and this is what Steve and I message every single day. We just had our QBRs last week and we hammered this point. It's every group tenable. So it's getting product aligned, making sure they're building and developing the platform the way it needs to be. It's getting that marketing message right. Omega o', Leary, our CMO did an incredible job literally rebranding Tenable, working on creating the exposure management category where we're now number one not in the top up. Right. But number one in Gartner, IDC and Forrester in the exposure management category. So marketing has to do their part. Right. You then look at finance. We're going to be billing and charging and pricing and packaging differently. So finance needs to to be on board, the tech support needs to be on board, professional services and then sales. Right. And so then it's like okay, for sales you gotta be specific and you really gotta the reps. And we did this at sales kickoff meetings where it is all about tenable one and you obviously modify your comp plans to drive that behavior. Right. You then go in and you work with your different sellers on the enablement and the training. You disincentivize other type things that aren't the right thing for the company long term like selling an individual product. That might be the easy way to get a quick land but it's not selling the platform which is going to give you the opportunity to get expansion and it's the right thing for the customer. Most importantly, all of those things are huge contributors. But what I tell folks is that this is by far going from an individual product company or a few different products going to a platform play is a company wide, you have to be in full sync and every group needs to be on the same marching orders. And that's where as co CEO Steve and I drill that into every single meeting we go into with every department and our messaging is clean and pristine and it matches. So he's saying the same thing I'm saying vice versa and I think you know, tenable. Our employees have done an incredible job responding and it's pretty cool to see. Yeah, it's fun.
- [55:22]
B
Well done buddy. Well done.
- [55:24]
C
I just want to go back and ask Mark day to day for your health. I know you're doing the body scans, you're doing the blood tests and getting the biomarkers and all that day to day. When did you change? Since Amit's death? Yeah, one thing did you say? Oh, I'm absolutely changing.
- [55:42]
A
This just kind of two things. One, and this is going to sound so trendy is saunas. I become a massive believer. I don't do as much cold plunging as all the other people, but I live and die for saunas and I try to incorporate that five or six times. It truly to me that is a game changer.
- [56:00]
C
Five to six times a week myself bro.
- [56:02]
A
Exactly. And it definitely detoxes, cleans it. But to me the stretching, the mobility things you can do when you're in the sauna and then the cardiovascular benefits I think are awesome. And then the other thing is the diet, right. As I said and by far it is not a perfect diet by any stretch of the imagination. Still love to have a couple of beers and A couple glass of wine on the weekends.
- [56:20]
C
Sure.
- [56:20]
A
You know, still with my kids, I'll go to tailgate to watch one of their college games and I'll have, you know, probably some hot dog and something I shouldn't, but I really stripped out lots of sugars, lots of carbs. Try to be that Monday through Friday, super kind of clean diet, the intermittent fasting, kind of eat my first meal right around that 12:30, 1 o' clock time period. You know, all of those things that become kind of mainstream, but I'm telling you, they work because I do my blood every few months and so far, couple things that argue.
- [56:47]
C
Can't argue with that. Yeah.
- [56:49]
B
So, Mark, just one last question on this. You know, strength and determination. Motivation. Do you think it's more of a. More of a sign of McMahon being able to do so many pull ups or so many toe touches or so many calf raises or whatever the hell else he does on Monday, Friday?
- [57:13]
A
Yeah.
- [57:13]
C
And.
- [57:14]
B
Or do you think it's old fashioned, three feet apart, lining up and see who wins? Could you just comment on that for me?
- [57:21]
A
I mean, listen, as you know, Cap, you and I are two knucklehead football players, college football players. So I'm gonna have to go with option two. Here's the deal with McMahon, here's what I'm hearing with Johnny Mack is that he's so obsessed with his golf game now, he's doing every bit of training to manipulize his golf swing. Johnny Mac is the doing any and everything to become which. That's the type of guy John McMahon is. He's doing everything he can to go after his golf game. Now, I'm not sure if that's true, John. That's just what the rumor mill has.
- [57:49]
C
All right, that's a good rumor mill, but it's not true.
- [57:53]
B
So does that mean, does that mean
- [57:55]
C
test the strength, though, is whether or not like Cap thinks he's going to line up against me and we're going to go head to head like I said. Okay, then go line up against the sumo wrestler. It doesn't matter like, but if you can't pull yourself up, without doubt you can do one pull up you can't do. He says he's not strong, by the way.
- [58:15]
A
Totally great. But here's the deal. And you know this, John, I was having some fun on the golf thing, but you know the number one test for longevity is grip strength.
- [58:24]
C
Yes.
- [58:25]
A
You look at all the different modalities of how to test for longevity. The number one test is grip strength. A it shows just core classic strength you have, but then as you get older, you're going to fall down, you need to grab a railing, you need
- [58:36]
C
to do whatever grip strength or pull yourself up.
- [58:39]
B
Dude, the guy won't get within three feet of me so I can't get a grip on him. So that's, that's. He has no chance again.
- [58:46]
C
That's because I'm so fast, dude.
- [58:49]
A
It's the bike training. I love it.
- [58:50]
B
Everybody, you are amazing. You're an amazing friend. You're an amazing example of excellence. So proud for you and everything you've done in your career and what you're doing at tenable is just amazing. And taking the time to, you know, it's not easy to get you on the podcast and you taking the time to do that, it's just amazing. Dude, we appreciate you tons.
- [59:15]
A
Well, listen, I appreciate both of you guys. Love you guys. To my favorite people to be able to spend time with. And listen, this is. I love the form that you guys have built, you know, with the podcast and the message you guys deliver. We have tons of our tenable people and friends all around the globe that, that listen to this podcast and take advice, you know, every week, every two weeks. So you guys keep jamming, doing what you're doing and as much appreciated. It's awesome seeing you guys.
- [59:40]
C
Class act. Stay strong, stay healthy, my friend.
- [59:43]
A
Back at you, Johnny. See you guys. Cheers. Bye bye.
- [59:46]
B
See you, buddy.
- [59:50]
A
Thanks for listening to today's episode.
- [59:52]
C
If you enjoy the content, please subscribe,
- [59:54]
A
rate and review the show to help help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.