Inventing Threat Intelligence: The Story Behind Eldon Sprickerhoff's startup success

Secure Talk - Eldon Sprickerhoff

Justin Beals:  Hi everyone, and welcome to Secure Talk. This is your host, Justin Beals. I've been involved in entrepreneurship and building companies since 1996, when I wanted to start a record label for house music. That company didn't get off the ground, but I've found the work of building a product, especially a technology product, developing a team around it to both invent and support it and bringing that into the marketplace to be one of the most intriguing efforts of my career. 

And I haven't done it once. I've done it many times. It's been so interesting. Part of the reason it's interesting is that it's very hard. It's easy to fail. And even if you're a deep expert, it can be easy to fail and wind up starting the next one. 

Also, though I've been working likely in cybersecurity with Strike Graph, I need to learn a lot about security broadly and how our company solves problems. And it is a very unique space. And there's a lot of nuance to building a great product in the market that grows really well.

But today, we really have the opportunity to talk up to a luminary in both building new companies and entrepreneurship and security product solutions. Someone that has become a friend of mine as I've had a chance to chat with him and learn from him over the past couple of years, and someone that I think has a lot to tell us about building cybersecurity companies. 

So, today, we're going to get to meet with Eldon Sprickerhoff.  Eldon is a renowned entrepreneur, advisor, mentor, investor, and board member who has worked at the intersection of information security, computer science, machine learning, software as a service and finance.

Eldon is really best known for co-founding eSentire, a leading global managed detection and response cyber security services provider. And if I might break in here a little bit, Eldon has been innovative in the marketplace on developing solutions for advanced threat protection. Building the next generation of products.

Eldon holds a bachelor of mathematics with a major in computer science and a minor in economics from the University of Waterloo. In 2019, he received the J. W. Graham Medal in computing and innovation for his pioneer contributions to cybersecurity. In 2024, he was included into the Waterloo Regional Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, and currently, he serves as a strategic advisor at Caledon Adventures and is the author of a great book, Committed, Startup Survival Tips and Uncommon Sense for First Time Tech Founders. One of the best founder books, business books, entrepreneur books that I've read recently. Please join me in welcoming Eldon to the podcast today. 

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Justin Beals: Eldon, welcome to Secure Talk. Thanks for joining us today. 

All right. Eldon, you graduated from college in 1991 with a computer science degree from Waterloo University.

And we're always a little curious about the environment in which we get involved in our careers, especially for our early and career listeners. Tell me, what were your concerns, assumptions, and desires as you left academia into the professional world? 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: So, you know, in 91, that's a long time ago, and you know, I, I vividly remember, you know, a lot of excitement and fear.

I think, you know, part of the, the big thing that, you know, back then there was this sort of global macro issues. So, yeah, I had a degree in computer science and economics. So acutely aware of the global macro issues, right? North America was going through a recession, you know, incredibly high interest rates, 16, 18%.

It was, there's no guarantee that someone, the tech grad, you know, the tech grad, was going to get a job. There was, I even now I know a couple of people in my graduating class that, that didn't manage to get jobs in their field and that ultimately prevent them from getting sort of full time tech employment.

Even after the recession ended a few years later, because, you know, at that time, there were a few more years of new grads, that got caught up. But so, you know, very in, in some ways sort of reminiscent of what's going on right now. I was very lucky. University of Waterloo had a co-op program and I'd gone through that with a company called Royal Bank of Canada.

And so I ended up with a job offer from the RBC with their trading systems group. And It was a very, it was a really plumb job in a group that was, you know, very dynamic and ahead of their time, you know, with the first SunOS, SunSystems, SunSpark systems, internet connection, the first Cisco equipment that went into the bank back then, so a very, you know, um, Turbulent time in tech and also in, in the economy.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I graduated college in 95. So it was a little bit later, but also tech was emerging as an industry. I think for me, the opportunity with tech was in telecommunications. But I do remember my first work at British Telecom; we had three Sun Microsystems computers, three Spark computers, and one little Windows NT machine for email. It was so powerful.It was really fun. Yeah. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Yeah. It was all like a token ring back. That was the, the bank standard back then took like 16, 16 Meg token ring. I think it was, you know, 91 is, is sort of when the, the world's wide web sort of, you know, broke on the scene at the beginning. And so very, very interesting, turbulent times, very,  if you, you can use a very similar analogy with, you know, AI and the economic knockdown and the turbulence that that's, that's right now.

Justin Beals: Yeah. I have a little mantra for my team that in, in chaos. Which I think is what we're experiencing a little bit right now. There is opportunity. You know, it's actually in the when things are kind of defined and the powers that be are mapping the course for everyone that it's very hard to get a new innovation or I think a practice.

You and I have enjoyed entrepreneurship, a new business off the ground. Yeah. But when things are falling apart in some ways, there's some opportunity to build something that you you're joining us today because I had a chance to read through a book you've been working on “committed”  about your journey in entrepreneurship, which started pretty early.

I think after your initial work for RBC, is that right? When you first started thinking about founding a company? 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: No, I left RBC. I went to a software company. Then I started consulting and, you know, worked at a very large newspaper chain. And then, in the dot com era, went down to New York and worked for a prime brokerage.

And that was where I sort of cut my teeth on some of the processes and so on. And then, you know, the dot com. Was your, you know, the gold rush and then the dot bomb and then came back home to Toronto and started East End Times. That was the end of, just after 9/11. So the end of 2001. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. In reading the book, I think I've I felt a lot of trauma that, that I've also experienced in this work.

And I just had to ask, you know, as I think to my future someday, was it a cathartic experience? Would you recommend it to any post-founder? 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Yeah, you know, I think it was like, I'm going to be honest, it was, it was astoundingly therapeutic for me and, you know, it helped, it helped to dig up, you know, many of the skeletons of early started, uh, you know, startup life that, that hadn't probably been properly buried.

Let me sort of examine them with a critical eye and then give them a, a proper burial for, you know, at the end, the, you know, as you know, the, the stress is That are put on a founder, interpersonal struggles, cashflow, everything. It's a, it's a long list. And I, you know, I feel it's important. It was very important for me to share these, the realities of startup life with others who are also in the early stages of their startups.

And it's, this is just how it is. It's all, it's not all this sort of influencer porn with some super cars and private planes and, you know, yachts. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. Yeah. That, that is the afterglow of, yeah. Right. Timing. Yeah. Yeah. I, I have to say, I'm, I'm very grateful for the book and the pragmatic approach you took to it.

It is of all the business books that I've ever read, Eldon. Which isn't that many, but I've read some. It's the only one I've ever recommended to a friend. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Thank you. Thank you. It's, it's been really, it's been really interesting. You know, a few people have read it, and there's one person in particular who runs the labs part, and it's, you know, incredibly intelligent person who, you know, reads everything.

And he said to me, you know, you know, he enjoyed the book. He, I said, well, yeah, look, I'm, I'm more comfortable. I'm more comfortable with criticism. The praise is, well, I'm not your, I'm not at the target of the market. I said, well, so understood, right. He's he's not, but I have thought about in the past starting a company and your book helped to convince me that I made the right decision in not doing so, you know, because it's, it's so, you know, I have a lot, you know, I, I have empathy for people starting businesses. It's such a, so much more stressful than you would expect. And so that was very telling to me that, you know, it, it hit home.

And so I, I thank you for, for referring it to other people. You know, the part of it is the, the William Gibson, you know, it says you never know the, the tool, the, the street has its, finds its own use for tools. So I, I never, like, I don't know who it's going to affect. The other thing that he said of that film first, personally, he's glad that he thinks it reassured him that he made the right decision.

And then he said, everyone who's in product should read this book. No, it's like the street will find its own use for these tools. So I like, so first of all, Justin, thank you for taking the time to read it. My time is that commodity. We don't, we can't make more of and for referring it to a friend. I said I'm grateful for that.

Justin Beals: Yeah, it certainly enriched my life. My family my growing up environment was very conservative. I actually didn't have TV, but I did have a library card, and I consumed a lot of reading material. And so not all books are equal. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: And I know from a previous conversation, we had a very similar, you know, life arc, especially in the early years.

And, you know, I've always  found solace in, in books and I'm still, I still devoured them. So I'm, again, I'm, I'm honored that you took the time and that you've found it valuable enough. And I, Lisa, I hope, I hope it helped sort of, you know, even. You know, we're quite, quite far out of the sort of startup mode right now.

Yeah. Uh, but that it helped you with sort of, you know, looking at some of the, the aspects of your life. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. It's a constant practice. You know, you're never, you're, you're balancing so much that reminding what matters, being reminded of what matters, just helps even if you're 10, 15 years into a journey.

As a matter of fact .One of the things that really hit home for me is a story you talk about in the opening chapters of the book, where you describe one of your early mentors, a very different than the social, what social media tries to teach us about how this works. This mentor ran a cleaning service. Can you describe a little bit about why that was useful?

Eldon Sprickerhoff: You know, it was, you know, pretty far from tech and really far from cyber security. But you know, he, you know, he was, I would, you know, I'd be working late, you know, crazy hours and he'd be in there cleaning other offices. And I got to know him because he was like very dedicated, had pride in the job they did.

And, you know, over the years, again, we're both working late. So we take, you know, 10 minutes or so and just talk about things. And, you know, he had, you know, he started with the same kind of rose color glasses, and all startups begin with. You know, you're going to, you know, his, his focus was, you know, there's this big office building and, you know, right out the gate, I'm going to, I'm going to, they're all going to be clients and just, and then reality hit in and what it took to, to make sales and, and hire people and fire people and balance these things.

And so, you know, I had a lot of, he had a lot of experience. Right? Here's more than I had. Um, but the nuts and bolts of a lot of businesses is, is pretty much the same. So you know, all those back end components that you don't like to think about, you know, you prefer to ignore when you're starting your business.

So you know, taxes, insurance, how do you schedule work, hiring, firing employees,  how do you, how do you get the right balance of employees to, to do the work you have an idea of what your, the quality of work should be, and you can't do it all yourself. So, what is the method by which you confirm that the quality of work that's being done by everyone that works for you across these different locations is up to stuff.

 And, you know, like he, he had a lot of experience of what works. And so, you know, I would pay him, like I said, in the book, I would ping him with different questions as we went through, like he had more employees than we did. And yeah, at that, at the beginning, and then, you know, we, we surpassed him, and so it's sort of the table flip, but, you know, I said, if you, if you have to look around to see who your sort of unlikely mentors are, who has expert expertise and experience. I think you're kind of a fool if you don't take advantage of the expertise of those around you that are willing to share. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. And while certainly our work in tech, I think about it more as like where we craft things, you know, where we build these products, but the way they go to market and the way humans behave doesn't necessarily change because we're a tech-based company. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: It's, it's a vector, right? It's just a vector for, you know, is this, is there pain?

Can you solve the pain? Will someone, does someone trust you enough to solve this pain that they'll pay you to do so, whatever that is, whether, you know, you know, is it a, you know, and that's, that that's very basic distilled, right? Go to market methodology. 

Justin Beals: You are, are pretty vociferous in the beginning stages of the book about how much pain this is going to be, how to be prepared yourself, you know, for that particular pain.

And what came to mind as I read this, as a matter of fact, you, you state running a startup is the hardest thing I've ever done. So you were, you led eSentire for 23 years as a founder, quite a period of time. That's highly, I think most people that get into, especially a tech-based venture capital-backed startup are like in five years I'm going to be IPOing and we'll be sitting back and counting the dollars, right?

Yeah Yeah, what what intrinsically motivated you? Especially through the times that you were like this is gonna fail. I'm riding the roller coaster dow.n 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Yeah, I think the first thing to say is that I, you know, so I'd say this book, right? I'd taken a P lock in a home equity line of credit out, and I said, if it failed, we would have lost the house, lost our home.

Right. And then a little bit later on, you know, things get really difficult and, you know, for different reasons. And, you know,  I, the, one of the big things that kept me going was the first dozen customers Who'd believed in me, right. They'd, you know, you know, in that early stages. You've, you know, you've got people that have staked their own reputation and their careers on you as a startup.

So they've done that for me, and I did not want to let them down because they staked themselves, their lives and, and, and careers and reputation on supporting me. So. You know, I was going to go down fighting. I said to my co-founders if we, if we don't succeed, it won't because we didn't try hard enough.

And it sort of fits into this, my thought process of, you know, survive as long as you can until you reach a, you know, find a lucky break. Uh, whatever that lucky break is, whether it's a big client or, you know, a new mentor or some, you know, something that comes through that changes as an inflection point in your, in your company's arc.

Uh, and then you survive again until the next lucky thing, right? We've, we've had so many lucky breaks during those two-plus decades, but if we had not survived, we couldn't have taken advantage of them. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. I, when I, in my darkest moments about the work of, that I do as a founder. Or as a company leader today, I have a little saying that I remind myself is that you've never been afraid of hard work, and today won't be the day.

And I just remind myself to put the foot forward and do the hard thing, and that is the control you have on the flip side. I love this idea, and you, you're, again, it's an important theme in the book of being a chief survival officer because my early experiences, especially as a first-time founder was like, I, I need to survive to the opportunity that I'm hoping will come painful.

But I like the pragmatic, you know, the pragmatic approach of the, the plain speak from a survivalistic perspective. Yeah. What, you know, what, what were, was it left field when those waves came where you could lift the company up, or did you feel like you were planful for it? 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: You know, I think there are so many things that to get, if I look at those inflection points, they were like, you know, life preservers that were there, you're in the water and a life preserver shows up right in front of you as you grab onto it. Whereas like, this is, this is an opportunity I can't turn down. So, here we go. It was, You know, just recognizing what it is and taking advantage of it in that time. And, you know, just squeezing, you know, squeezing all the juice out of the orange that you can at that time. Not, you know, hope is not a strategy, but when you get that chance, just completely commit to it. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. One of the things that I do love about the work, and I think it's the reason that I've come back to it is that both the product work and the company being a founder. It really is well done. If you understand how to practice it in an ego-less way, I believe, at least in my work.

And you have this saying, if ignorance were a breakfast cereal, we'd have been based in Battle Creek, Michigan, home to Kellogg's Cereal City and the annual National Cereal Festival. Um, you know, how do you, how did you find a method in balancing both an ego to say, “I have a vision, and I want to bring it the change”, but also being willing to say, Hey, my vision needs to change.Like something is broken?. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of ways to interpret that. I think probably your best. Chance for success. I think this year's vision enacted is to sort of curate excellent people who understand it and share it and let them do their best work in their own way to make it happen with sort of regular sampling to, to make sure that you're.

You know, regular sampling to make sure that that is going the way that you're, you had originally hoped for it's, it's, I don't think in that, that balancing act, I don't think it's easy, but you have to be comfortable with, with, a certain amount of letting it go. 

Justin Beals: Yeah, you, you know, committed is a pretty pragmatic approach to developing a business.

As a matter of fact, I was reflecting before this interview. I was like. What is my favorite other business book that I've ever read? And I realized it was “How To Start a Record Label”, which is something I read in 1997. And I was like, that, that is, was also a very pragmatic approach to building a particular business.

And one of the things that I think has been interesting is like the availability of capital. In doing some of this work and you, you've seen the ups and downs of this and realize that capital is not always around your state. Do not assume that funding solves all issues. Keep to your own knitting, embrace the suck and get out there and grow your business.

And I think this was an area of selling of being a salesperson for your organization that you in making the transition from a technical founder into leading the company was a struggle. It was an area of learning. Is that right? 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The, you know, I'm such a big believer in in founder led sales.

I think one of the things that I've come to appreciate is that you know, especially if you're, you know, introverted or like super tech-focused, you've really gotta get your story down pat. And part of that is, is selling your story. And I, you know, you know, I think if you, if you can't, you know, there, first of all, there's a big distrust, I think, generally from tech people.

And this is, this is my own sort of weakness here, you know, thinking that selling is, you know, used car salesman sort of greasy underhanded piece. But, you know, if you, if you can't sell your story, you can't talk to potential employees. You've got to keep on selling the vision to existing employees. You got to talk to potential clients and ongoing clients, and then, you know, potential investors, and then your full-time your current investors as it is, the process is the same, the lens is slightly different. But if you can't at the core of it, sell the vision, the deliverable, the outcome, you're not going to succeed. 

It's like, keep hammering on this, especially in the last few months as you know, I've been reflecting on what's been coming out of the book and how it's, how people have responded to it.

That sort of thing that the founder-led sales isn't just to your potential clients. It's through, it's a nonstop, it becomes, it's got to become core to what you are good at. I don't think you can succeed if you don't pick that out. 

Justin Beals: My first work in founding companies was bootstrapped as well, and it's made me hypersensitive to revenue because we had to make payroll more money than we spent every quarter for the business.

And I, your chapter on funding is chapter number 20 in the book, and I thought that said something about where you put it in the priority list of building a company. It's a little against the grain, I think, for media and what we've seen happening in Silicon Valley. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Well, there, there's so much that, again, sort of bothers me about that, where, and so part of this, I think, goes back to the sort of playing house, you know,  as a founder, where you think that like the, you know, we, you know, different media, which has, you know, they did this big raise, they did this raise, they did this race, you know, that's, you know, like the, you know, you don't, you don't congratulate the chef for, for buying the, the vegetables, right?, for buying the produce to make the meal, it's the outcome that's important. 

And we, you know, there's, there's a lot that goes behind that, that process. And again, the, you know, one of the things that irks me is the, you know, the entrepreneur or start-up porn that's on TV, right? You know, you go on, you talk to your dragons or sharks or, you know, someone else's teeth or fire.

And you know, you do your five-minute pitch, and they say,  they grill you for a couple of minutes, and that's done, you got your deal. Yay or nay. And I know that you've, you know, Walk that path with funding, and that's not how it happens, right?. That's, you know, and even if you dig deeper into the TV shows, like fully, you know, more than half of those, those companies that got a deal or a verbal deal don't eventually pass due diligence.

So it's, you know, so I, you know, there's, I think it's getting a little bit clearer as to what reality looks like for raising money. You know, I think AI is really hot right now. And there, you know, there's always a bubble that comes up at what's, what's the shiny thing right now. But you know, one of the things I keep saying is like, look, you're, I guess part of it is what, you know, what, what is the outcome?

Like, what is the outcome that you would like to see in, in five, 10, 15 years and figure out what it would take to get there. And it's, you know, there's part of the, the very pragmatic. View of it is, you know, when I go back to the inverse Russian roulette, the vast majority of startups aren't going to survive 10 years, you know,  your options.

And just because you raise money, doesn't mean that you're going to survive, but you can go back and see the, the survival rate of YC companies. And it's, you know, it's generally better than outside, but it's not a surefire thing. It just, it's just the, the beginning stages, you know, if you can, you know, one of the other things I say when I've been working with a lot of startups the last few years, and part of it is, you know, I said, why do you want to go away so much of your company so early, you know, find it's, they're not just, you know, people aren't just giving you money.

They demand a return. And I'd like it fast. And now, you know, someone else owns your company. And depending on how big a piece of it is, you are under the gun. And it's, it's, you know, that might come as a surprise. Like you, you have, you know, and if you have a couple of investors, You might struggle to find the next investor because they don't want another cook in the kitchen.

And they're like all these things that I know you're aware, but I didn't think there was a lot of discussion of what that really looks like. Once you get on that treadmill, the idea is you need to make money and quickly and you'll be held to that as, as, uh, just as reality. 

Justin Beals: It's funny. I was pretty terrified about raising capital, having been a bootstrap founder in the past,  and taking that business through an M and a process because I just, I was very concerned about the expectations of people that I really liked who I thought were quite brilliant at the work that they do.

I wasn't so afraid of sharing in the ownership because I believed that they would, and I, I probably did my interviews this way, care about that outcome the same as I did, and we would be aligned. And I think one of the things that I've done. I'm, this is my first time as a CEO with a board, but one of the things I've done is I've told them, I'm not sure they wanted to hear it, but I've reinforced it that they're on my team and that we work together at the outcome that I didn't, they didn't hire me as much as I hired them.

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Well, you know, that's, that's a great way to put it. It also helps when you've got a great investor. Right. And that's, and that's not necessarily the default as well, right? So, yeah. And, and I, I think you can, you know, you can admit that you've got a pretty, you're not going to say if you have a bad investor, but no, I, we, we, you know, we know, I know in common who's on that, on the team and, and you've done very well with them.

Justin Beals: Oh, I've, I've been incredibly lucky and that's deeply heartfelt. They are an amazing team. And I think that's one of the things that I've enjoyed about the journey. The most is the people I get to work with has been brilliant. Yeah. 

And there's one statement that you make that before we shift gears here a little bit, But I just really tugged at my heartstrings in the book, But you say “The best money you can ever raise is through sales, period”. And you actually have a mathematical formula around it where the cost of, of investment capital versus the cost of a new contract, you know, is,  like a, a five X difference almost. Yeah. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: So it's, you know, you get so much valuable information from, from sales period, right?

Like you've got, does your product market and go-to-market plan work? Does your, did your sales approach work? You've got this, your, your ideal client profile. Did that match up what you thought it was going to be? You gain a referenceable customer. Then that helps you get a network of future sales. You, you know, you get, you know, other data so you can, you know, if you're KPI driven and you should be, it helps to, you know, add to your deal size, average deal size, average, average customer value.

It's a sales cycle, conversion rates, gross margin, like all, all these things, right?. And, you know, that's just on the, in the Intel that, that sales gets you. I say that, yeah, there was, Steve Cheney was the name of the jet that had that rule, right? It says, you know, when you're doing going through venture investing, they give you a dollar to invest, they want to see 1o,  Or a hundred times return. 

And then, you know, just from the asymmetry of sales that, you know, every dollar you get from a client is worth five. From from an investor. And I thought it was interesting. It makes sense. I don't think I have a lot of empirical on, uh, data on the, on the, on the last half, but I do know that just how early stage, um, investing there, you know, they'd like to have one or two out of the 10 investor portfolio companies to have, you know, a hundred times return on, on that initial investment. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: And  I think, you know, as a founder, like you've got a, a singular superpower, and that's that founder authenticity that I've,I 'm sure you've seen, and you know there's, if you're going up in competitive situations, the founder has an authenticity that no other salesperson has in any competitor, you know, competitive place because you're all in and you're committed to it. 

You're all there, and you can, you know, you can use that power and you should use that power in that sales, in that sales motion. 

Justin Beals: Yeah, I join seven to ten sales calls a week myself. Yeah, and I love it. Actually, it is really connecting with the customer it allowed. I'm passionate about our vision and product. I think we built a great one I get to represent that sometimes I feel like I'm stealing the stage a little.

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Part of the deal prevention team, right? That's one of the fears that salespeople have when you bring the, when you bring the founder into the, into the call. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. You know, Committed is a deeply a book about what you learned as being a first-time founder and how to prep first-time founders. But of course, on Secure Talk here, we talk a lot about security broadly as a topic, and you are a deep expert in cybersecurity.

And I wondered if you'd take a minute with me and dive through some of. Um, the cyber security space that we're dealing with. My first question, Eldon, was about the early days of eSintire and cyber security. You know, I read that you started out developing eSintire as a managed security services provider, generating revenue through vulnerability scans.

And one of the things you highlight is that there were a lot of competitors and the activity seemed like a commodity. How did you differentiate, you know, your, your eSentire out of that? I mean, today we have a ton of pen testing firms and vulnerability scanning firms around still?

Eldon Sprickerhoff: I like to sort of redefine components. Especially things that are known as low-hanging fruit. So like that, that's what a vulnerability scanning place was kind of low-hanging fruit. Uh, but when you can think of if you can structure in a ways that differentiate yourself and then provide exceptional outcomes. It can help to stand out from the competition.

So, you know, one of the frames or works I talk about in the book is the Vico piece, right? So that's a visibility, insight, control, and outcome. So, you know, if you can, you know, visibility is what raw data you could gather across all possible factors; insight is, you know, what actual valuable information can you use when you're, you're plucking from that raw data control is what kind of, you know, defense mechanism, you know, interrupt the attack that you can affect given this offering. And then outcomes, what is the outcome that the client actually absolutely needs? And can you, how well do you deliver that? 

So that's. You know, when you use that framework, it's, it helps to stand out from say, sort of features versus like fully fledged products or offerings as well. So, there's a lot that can be, you know, that can, that could answer that, that can be better categorized if you use that framework as an example. That's, that's one thing that, that we did, you know, I put that whole plan to sort of switch, you know, from just vulnerability scanning and penetration testing into sort of an ongoing managed service. It was intentional, right?

We, you know, we, we'd started off as a scanning doing scanning. And then, like, at the time, it was just external scanning from the Internet, uncredentialed external scanning. We put a network sensor in there to capture and analyze traffic and, you know, even though that was a consulting engagement, we  had the intention and belief that we would do everything we could to make sure the client would be so enamored by that solution that they would demand that it be left behind.

And that turned it into what ended up being the MDR offering that exists today. 

Justin Beals: Yeah. Did you, were you aware of this move to real-time vulnerability scans? I mean, I think that's something that stood out to me where these were more time-boxed type of, you know, in a-moment testing to an on-demand testing situation.

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Yeah, and, you know, part of it again, that was one of those inflexion points where, you know, the, the client was, you know, didn't have to wait for 2 weeks to get a report. They had an instantaneous result that there's something bad going on here. right now, go fix it. And they, they were so pleased with, the report itself, so they, you know, they had a need to have a regular annual vulnerability scan performed. So we, we gave them that what they wanted, but also gave them more where it says, okay, there's something going on right now. You need to resolve it immediately. And that was so much more than what they expected. And there was nobody else that was doing that at the time.

And so. You know, after we gave the present the, the report, the presentation, they were very happy with that. And they were going to doing their remediation. They're like, would you, you know, can I keep this? Box in here. And that was, yes, of course, in the early days, right? Anything that's going to drive revenue.

Yes, of course you can. And that was sort of that pivot points. Okay. Let's, let's, again, instead of just a one off thing, let's make it intentional and double down on this ongoing, right? You know, recurring revenue piece, that happens serendipitously because we were trying to bend over backwards for the client.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I love this. What I hear is that you're listening carefully to what the customer is asking for, the problem they're trying to solve, and what capacity you have to solve that problem with the product. Yeah. You know, it seems to me, you mentioned it here that one of your superpowers is kind of the ability to model a situation or information and deal with the constituent parts and how you want them to relate to each other.

How would you, you know, thinking abou, you know, the modeling and behavior of systems. I'm curious about how you think about the marketplace of cybersecurity tools broadly and specifically advanced, persistent threat-type solutions, which I think you're a deep expert in. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: There's so much tooling available these days.

And you know, I was at, uh, Black Hat and RSA and many other conferences this last past year. You know, there's just this, it's all the marketeering. It's all, everything's built on AI. And, you know, I think It's all the same, right? All the messaging is the same. So, you know, there's a lot of tooling that has come out that feels more like a feature than, sort of a fully functioning application or, platform.

And so, you know,  in that kind of situation, I, I go back to the, the Vico framework, right. To see, okay, how does this specific tooling fit into a, like a broader defense stance, right? Visibility, Insight, Control, and Outcome. What, like, what actually ticks those boxes and how does it tick those boxes? So I think that that's the, again, the framework that I, I'm using to cut to the core of efficacy and efficiency.

Justin Beals: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a little curious about this. You know, we've built a lot of software since we started plugging computers into each other. There's some accepted practices and certainly some platforms that are widely adopted. I think especially of the open-source tools that we use for things like concurrent versioning systems or things like that.

What is the opportunity? Or have we reached a little bit of a stasis point? Is it hard to build new platforms with so much already built, or are there big problems that you think about, , we need to focus on? 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Yeah, you know, there's still, so we're coming up to 2025, and there's going to be all the, you know, pres forgot, Prognostication.

And you know, and I always sort of, you know, cringe a little bit when you know, when it's like, look forward, it's like, well, like, it's just more of the same. Yeah. I think a lot of the focus, you know, there's still threats. There's no silver bullet. I think if we're going to look at sort of a focus thing, since, like sort of deepfakes, The challenge of non-repudiation hardware, componentry, trust, right?

These are difficult core problems that probably aren't being handled as much as we should, you know, yeah. AI, of course, right. But we'll, you know, adversarial, uh, uses and then defensive pieces. Probably there's, there's room to, to find solutions that sort of better, to better defend sort of distributed edge processing loads and pieces, you know, once in a while I get the question about quantum, you know, a quantum sort of that, maybe that ephemeral threat, you know, it still keeps getting pushed out. You know, we had that sort of inevitability of it, but you know, it's, it's difficult to say when that's going to be a, what, what can be done right now to deal with that.

But they're, you know, they're still trying to work through what's considered the best cypher suite for quantum-proof cypher suites. Right. So it's just, it's, you know, very much is more of the same, but much, much more of the same as we, you know, start to get, dig deeper into what can be done with ML models and, you know, the, the rise of MLLMs and both adversarial and defensive side.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I think about, um, an expanding complexity in a way, you know, we have very large organizations that are multivariate in the way they want to work. And, you know, there's needs to be a certain amount of flexibility about an ability to set expectations and also ability to have the expertise to meet those expectations.

You know, it's interesting to talk about quantum. I love reading about it. You know, I like reading the latest papers, and it seems like from a C, you know, a functioning CPU, we're fairly close but still working on error, it being error-prone and the power it takes to get through the error issues. But I the trend feels like it's going to more of a cloud computing situation where we'll just buy time on a large supercomputer like we used to back in the micro-frame days.

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Yep, it's that's and then it'll be enough to be in our desktops and then on our phones. And then, you know, a chip that, that Elon plugs into the back that, that gets upgraded. 

Justin Beals: Now,  I really want to thank you coming and joining us on Secure Talk. I definitely want to thank you for your deep expertise, in cyber security.

I mean, it's just, it's amazing. Interesting reading about the challenges and innovations on that thread alone. But I'm especially grateful for Committed. I have really enjoyed it and it was a little bit of therapy for me and certainly kind of highly recommend it no matter what business you're starting, actually, which I thought was great.

Oh, then this, is just really applicable for anyone wanting to start their own venture. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Well, thank you. Thank you for that. And for the amplification of it, you know, it was, I'd say it was a bit of reality check, a bit of cheerleading, a set of, you know, these are the mistakes I made go make more exciting, different mistakes than the ones that I made.

And just to give a very realistic perspective of what it's like to be a founder, discussing the things we don't like to talk about. 

Justin Beals: Wonderful. On that note, we'll say thank you to our listeners, and we'll see you all again next week. 

Eldon Sprickerhoff: Thank you.