← The Digital Executive
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- [00:00]
Katie Duke
Hi, I'm Katie Duke, and I've been a nurse for over 20 years. Listen, I used to think that I was my most stylish in my 20s, but honestly, style and confidence only get better with age. And that is why I love figs. These scrubs are beautiful, comfortable, and they are built to last. They're not those boxy, scratchy uniforms that we all started out in. No, no, no. These fit perfectly. They feel amazing, and the quality is just. Wow. My favorite color, burgundy. It's chic, it's timeless, and it's even the same color as my apartment because I'm kind of obsessed with it. And I love adding custom embroidery to make my scrubs as personal as my style. And since I work in telehealth, my embroidered figs even double as my ID badge. It's never too late to reinvent yourself or your scrubs. Get 15% off your first order at wearfigs.com with the code FIGSRX. That's wherefigs.com code FIGSRX for 15% off your first order.
- [01:09]
Brian
Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazant.com forward sl brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Raul Pavar. Raul Pavar is a serial entrepreneur, technologist, and leader. Before Red Sift, he founded Appsmart, which was acquired by Thomas Reuters Corporation in 2012. At Thomas Reuters, he served as the head of advanced products and innovation. And in a previous life, he was part of the founding team and principal technical architect at Shazam. Before the launch of the iTunes app store, he envisioned and created the first Shazam iPhone app. Well, good afternoon, Raoul. Welcome to the show.
- [01:56]
Raul Pavar
Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.
- [01:58]
Brian
Absolutely, my friend. It's been a while and hope you've been well. I know you were on the podcast previously, and I just really appreciate you coming back and having another conversation and updating our audience. Kind of where things are at in your technology career and leading as a leader in your organization. So, Raoul, I'm going to jump into your first question. You've been part of several transformative technology companies, from helping architect Shazam to founding Appsmart and now leading Redsift. What experiences along your journey shaped the path that brought you where you are today?
- [02:33]
Raul Pavar
Yeah, it's great. I think when you put it like that, it feels like a very long time, but I guess it has been. I class myself as a technologist going through I get excited by technology, but I'm not a technologist in the sense I get excited by the technology purely for what it is. I get excited because I think those technologies can have a really transformative impact on people. And that's the bit that has sort of been the common thread across all of these businesses that I've been involved in one way or the other. I like to work on problems that are genuinely sort of at the edge of what technology can do. And, you know, I think back in early 2000s, Shazam was one of those things, right? The idea of actually recognizing music out in the wild across many lifetimes worth of audio was difficult, but what was really cool was people really got a lot of value out of this. I still meet people who tell me it's one of the great experiences of the apps that they use on a daily basis and makes them smile. And I think that's the exciting part of the technology. At AppSmart, we were building early natural language processing technology to help people understand what content was most relevant to them. And then we later started to scale that up when Thompson Pointers acquired the business. And here at redsef, as we get a little bit older, we're thinking about the challenges with technology as it stands today. The way trust is fragile, the way digital transformation is sort of scaling across every dimension of our lives, but the security implications of that are not fully understood and fully addressed. So I think we're at a point where technology can be part of the problem or can be part of the solution. And the common thread is say, how do we take these capabilities that exist and actually make them work for the people? So at rents of cybersecurity, we're just trying to make that happen.
- [04:17]
Brian
Thank you. And I like what you said about that. Technology can be part of the solution or it can be part of the problem. And it's really how you look at that and applying it. Obviously, I can hear it in your voice. You're excited about the technology because it can have a transformative impact on people and in the world. And you are bringing great solutions to the world. And I like that you like to work on problems with technology is on that cutting edge of really trying to solve a bigger problem. And I think that's exciting. So thank you. And Raoul, at Redshift, your mission is to make the Internet fundamentally safer. What critical security gaps did you see in the Internet's infrastructure that inspired the creation of the company?
- [04:58]
Raul Pavar
Yes. Yeah. I think most people, organizations, consumers, sort of take. Take the Internet for granted, but what's interesting about the history of the development of the Internet is it was sort of, it wasn't really built with security, for want of a better word, as a first class citizen of the Internet. Right. It was sort of being layered on top. So back when we sort of think about the early, early use cases of the Internet, they were basically emerged from these interconnected networks, predominantly through universities that need to communicate with each other. And the idea of security was very much an afterthought. And then come.com, come the mobile revolution, come everything else. And the fact that so much of our identity and our business has translated to using the fabric of the Internet, we find that security is sort of built in these layers that sit on top of the Internet and they're very unevenly implemented and distributed. So basically what you have is an Internet that runs on trust layers that were never really designed for today's threat environment. So if someone sort of drops in and starts using the Internet, hey, why are all these things that exist phishing and zero day exploits and all these other things that sort of seem to be continuously assaulting the safety and business continuity of the services that we use and rely on? It's sort of because we're sitting in this world of this layer cake where this underlying technology, which is incredibly powerful, has basically been patched and adapted to meet the security requirements for modern business. But the reality is most organizations haven't really adopted all of these things as you can imagine. It's quite complex and there's a lot of the Internet that just relies on this sort of implicit trust model. And we need to actually start to develop modern, predominantly automated solutions that help organizations of every kind. And you know, and obviously at RedSec we work across relatively small organizations all the way to sort of government scale. So we understand what, you know, the challenges are, each range of that and make those solutions applicable for these organizations so they can effectively level up their security and ultimately lead to better outcomes for their customers, their employees, their supply chain, you know, everyone else who relies, eyes on them.
- [07:11]
Brian
Thank you. Really appreciate that. You're absolutely right. You and I remember back in the days of early Internet.com etc, and most people take the Internet for granted. They think that, you know, just because the Internet was developed without any real security, they still to this day think, hey, everything's fine. But there are so many layers across the Internet that have been patched and adapted for, you know, modern business, making it very complex today, as you said. But what you're doing at Red Sift is You're developing these modern, secure solutions where people can adopt and feel more confident about the work that they're doing across the Internet. So I appreciate that. And Raoul, as AI becomes more integrated into cybersecurity systems, how can organizations ensure that automation improves security without introducing new risks?
- [07:59]
Raul Pavar
Yeah, so AI is a very obviously interesting technology because as a technologist, I did not expect the capability that we have today to really happen. Within my professional career. I think machines have historically really struggled with a lot of the things that us humans find very easy to do. For the very longest time, you couldn't really build AI systems that could string together a compelling sounding sentence, much less make judgment calls on various types of assessments, as we do routinely today. So I think AI has just sort of emerged as this unreasonably powerful and incredibly useful technology over a very short period of time. And I think that has sort of led the world to many challenges and that we think about in the realm of security. I think the technology is poorly understood and completely implemented and introduces new threat models that most users and most businesses don't fully understand simply as a function of it being so surprisingly effective and at the same time being under such rapid development. So I think when you think about the use of AI, I think the first thing to acknowledge is that it is just an unreasonably useful piece of technology for organizations to ignore. And I think that's one of the challenges that we have is just so incredibly useful at doing things that are so hard and traditionally so expensive that it is frankly impossible to ignore. You're going to be using and integrating AI into your assessment and decisioning workflow in some way or form, whether you're an individual user or an organization or a security vendor such as ourselves, who's building these technologies for other organizations to adopt. I think the other thing that people have to recognize is it's actually incredibly powerful in ways that machines have always struggled with. Like I said before, it's. We couldn't have imagined that it would be so easy and relatively inexpensive to use AI to build what is effective human sounding conversation. But it's also meant that in speech and in vision and all these things that computers always struggled with to understand. It's now actually relatively inexpensive for us to build systems that can work with us in these very important domains of communication. Now, of course, the bad guys also have access to very similar technology. And so we find ourselves in a little bit of an arms race over here where it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to find and launch attacks and to surveil organizations online and surveil social media accounts online. And those sorts of things, which would have historically required a lot of human capital to be deployed, now can be done in a very mechanical, autonomous way. So it isn't contingent on us as vendors in the ecosystem and. And as organizations that are looking to protect the digital assets. To actually look at how do we use these technologies to more cost effectively combat these adversaries? Because I think if we think about this at a global scale, it really is about the economics of this. If it becomes incredibly inexpensive for someone to launch attacks against you, it has to be equally inexpensive for you to defend against them, because if you're not able to get that economic equation right, then you're structurally at a disadvantage. So I think it's very important that we're, quite frankly, aggressive about the adoption of these AI technologies. But along with that comes a whole new set of risks. They are not perfect machines in the same way human beings are not perfect machines. AI is vulnerable to various types of attacks that are specific to AI. AI is extremely powerful, but it is not without fault or error. So how do you set up the right guardrails so that you can use AI to amplify judgment, not necessarily replace it? And I think your question is very timely, but it's also probably a little bit complicated right now because I don't think we have all the answers. But I know that we're on the journey of actually understanding these systems better at implementing them and finding where they work most effectively and where they break.
- [12:14]
Brian
Thank you. Really appreciate that. And I would totally agree with you. We've been in technology a lot of times for a long time, Raul, but the last few years, technology has really advanced faster than ever before with this proliferation of AI. And as you mentioned, AI is unreasonably useful and a powerful technology that organizations. It's just impossible to ignore. People need to start to adopt this at the business and personal level, obviously, just to get ahead. But now the bad guys have this technology as well, and they're trying to penetrate businesses and again, disrupt businesses or obtain financial information or, you know, funding for that matter. So I appreciate your insights. And Raoul, the last question of the day, as we look ahead. How do you see the future of Internet security evolving over the next decade, and what role will proactive infrastructure and AI play in making the digital world safer?
- [13:10]
Raul Pavar
I think predicting the next 10 years from where we are today is a bit of a challenge, but I'll give it a go. I think like we described before, you know, clearly everyone in the digital space is predominantly using knowledge work in some way or form, right? We're not physically building houses. We're using digital technologies to sort of transform intelligence into some sort of, like, business outcome. And clearly, AI is the new machine that we've created that effectively turns energy into some form of intelligence. So it's pretty clear to everyone in the industry that, you know, AI is going to be a very sort of important and arguably the foundational component for the way we build, deliver and secure services over the next 10 years. But that means that everything effectively starts to move a lot faster and everything is a little bit less deterministic than it is today. So, you know, I think one reasonable example of that is that, you know, organizations have traditionally thought about their security infrastructure as the perimeter, and that's on the outside and everything on the inside, you protect it in a different way. Clearly, as you have these intelligent machines and intelligent agents scattered throughout your organization and throughout your entire business process, you clearly have many different boundaries in your infrastructure. Now that didn't have five years ago. So it's clear that the perimeter of an organization will sort of matter less and trust will matter a lot more. So how are all of these human agents and AI agents secured? What sort of data do they have access to? How do you enable the right guardrails that allow them to move at pace, while at the same time having characteristics like being auditable and being able to be replayed and sandboxed appropriately? So all of this points to the fact that security is going to become more of an architectural piece than a reactive piece. And I think that's quite important because, you know, in our industry, in cybersecurity, there's been a lot of focus on sort of like reach detection and response, which is clearly very important, because when bad things happen, you need to know what it is you're doing, you need to contain it, you need to measure it. But I think as we move to a world where everything happens at, you know, for want of a better word, AI speed, your infrastructure needs to be architecturally ready for the deaths that come, because things will be too noisy and too fast for you to just respond to things. So that's why I think fundamentally in our industry, security is just going to have to become a much more proactive and preventive process. And that requires a basic architectural rethink to say, how are we going to harden our attack surface? How are we going to discover everything that's important to us, all the assets, all the data, and how Are we going to keep that inventory effectively up to date on an ongoing basis? So there's a whole new dimension of complexity that I think is going to appear in the way security team thinks about security architectures. And of course, as all of this becomes more commercially relevant for every kind of business. Every kind of business can be digital in some way or the other. It's going to become a much more important executive and board level issue to say, how are we on top of all of these security risks? How are we actually progressing our security architecture to be ready for what comes in the next two to five years?
- [16:47]
Brian
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And I know you mentioned you don't really have crystal ball predicting the next 10 years, especially in this age of AI, but you did mention AI will be the technology that humankind will be leveraging the most to build and advanced technology and business ecosystems in the future, obviously. But from a security perspective, you talked about, you know, printers are going to matter less, right? More fluid, more dynamic, but trust will matter the most. And our infrastructure needs to have that be architecturally sound and ready and have more proactive and preventative processes in place. As you know, it's challenging in this cyber world we live in, especially with this proliferation of AI, as you talked about. So, Ronald, I really appreciate that and it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [17:34]
Raul Pavar
Absolutely. Thanks, Brian. Appreciate the conversation.
- [17:37]
Brian
Bye for now.
- [17:47]
Katie Duke
Hi, I'm Katie Duke and I've been a nurse for over 20 years. Listen, I used to think that I was my most stylish in my 20s, but honestly, style and confidence only get better with age. And that is why I love figs. These scrubs are beautiful, comfortable, and they are built to last. They're not those boxy, scratchy uniforms that we all started out in. No, no, no. These fit perfectly, they feel amazing, and the quality is just wow. My favorite color, burgundy. It's chic, it's timeless, and it's even the same color as my apartment because I'm kind of obsessed with it. And I love adding custom embroidery to make my scrubs as personal as my style. And since I work in telehealth, my embroidered figs even double as my ID badge. It's never too late to reinvent yourself or your scrubs. Get 15% off your first order at wearfigs.com with the code FIGSRX. That's wearfigs.com code FIGSRX for 15% off your first order.