263 - Navigating the Cybersecurity Landscape: An Approach to Vulnerability and Exposure Management with Securin's Ram Movva

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Ram Moven, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and founder of a company called Secure Securin. I want to get that right. S-E-C-U-R-I-N, which can be found at Securin.io. You guys are into cybersecurity. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me over.

Absolutely.

Honored to be here.

Thanks. So give us a little bit about your backstory. Obviously, I know that you did your, a lot of your undergraduate work in India. How did, what brought you to the United States? And I think you, you did your master's at Georgia Tech, if I recall correctly.

That's correct, yes. So a lot of people in my family have been to college and a lot of them have done master's. My dad never had the chance to get his master's, so he said that you have to go out there and learn, and he encouraged me. So right after my bachelor's, I gave my TOEFL and GRE, applied for a lot of schools, got admission in quite a few, and then went to BU actually for the first semester., and then I had admission to Georgia Tech as well. But then the advisor in BU advised me that Georgia Tech has a good program. You should consider if they're willing to take the college credits that you've earned in the first semester. And then I reached out and they said they were happy to give me credits. And I moved to Georgia Tech, stayed there in Atlanta for a little over a year, and then graduated from Georgia Tech.

And your master's?

I had a flavor of— went master's in systems engineering.

Cold and warm.

Yeah.

So your master's degree was in computer science?

No, it was in systems engineering. It was a mixed program from manufacturing systems. I took courses in computer science, electrical management, and from industrial engineering. It was a program that they started 2 years before I joined.

And then, so what happened after you got your master's degree?

After I got my master's degree, I moved to the Bay Area because I had family in Sacramento. Started interviewing for jobs and interviewed with many companies, including some companies in Atlanta who made cigarettes, British American Tobacco, key manufacturers. But then my cousins who were in the industry advised me that you should look into tech because that's where you have to grow your career. And so I, though I had other offers, I made sure that I got into tech space after moving here. Then I landed a job in about 2 months. Started working as a process engineer in material science, making disk drives. And then there was an opportunity to do software-related work in hardware industry. I knew how to code. And so I took that opportunity and started working on the software side. And then an opportunity came by because of a friend at TIBCO Software, back then a startup. I was, I think, employee 185 or 186, and then stayed there with them 10 years, saw how a startup grew. And I was always sure that I wanted to do something on my own. So I had 7 or 8 different jobs in those 10 years. I worked as in customer success, engineering, professional services, QA, performance engineering, security, and then decided to embark the entrepreneurial journey.

And how did you get into cybersecurity?

So interesting. My last role in TIBCO was a performance architect where during the dot-com, we had to run Tibco products, they had so many products on different software and hardware and published sizing guides, how they would perform from a stability perspective, throughput perspective. So I had a lot of horsepower. I had HP Solaris machines, Linux, Windows, different flavors. And when I was running my tests, I saw some abnormal behavior and went and investigated into it and found that somebody from overseas was running their programs on my hardware and horsepower. Wow. I just went up to IT. I went up to IT and I said, hey, what's going on? What are you guys doing? And we basically went and looked at the root cause and realized that there are some connections from outside and they were just enjoying the free horsepower.

Wow.

So that's how it intrigued me. And I knew it's just the beginning of dot-com e-commerce. So much of opportunity. And I said, it's just the beginning. And now today, after so many years, I'm gonna say still, it is still the beginning.

Really?

Yeah. I thought dot-com was it, but then cloud came by and after cloud, now it's AI. Even half of the country is not on the cloud. If you pick the 50 states, hardly half of the country is on cloud. So there's still a lot of digitization. If you look at globally, many governments across the globe are still, we're talking so much more advanced and it's open playground for every cybersecurity company.

Huh. So how do you go about forming Securon?

During the same time, my, my cousin and he was getting his PhD in security in New Mexico and they had some performance related advice they needed from certain state agency. So I flew down to Albuquerque, worked with them, learned what he was doing. And one thing what I learned from my CEO and Tipco was he always said that let's not go out and put a product out saying this is the silver bullet, rather hear what the customer has to say and let's go solve the problem. So that's what I said, we're doing all this great research. Do you know what the problem is today with some of your customers? He was a grad student and then we started off solving problems in security. And that led to an idea that let's start something formal through the university. And he started as a PhD student, something under the university umbrella, and he started solving problems for different state agencies. And we thought that was an opportunity and we started off in cybersecurity.

And that's how Securon was formed.

That's how RiskSense was founded.

Okay.

And I was a co-founder and an investor as well. And then we successfully exited it about 2.5 years ago. And Securon was a services organization predominantly. It was called CybersecurityWorks. We renamed it as Securon a couple of years ago. And as security practitioners, we knew what the problems were and we wanted to solve those problems. It's basically a data problem. So that's how we embarked on the journey, Securon.

And what kind of work does Securon do now?

So we do predominantly vulnerability management, exposure management, and validation with human cognitive intelligence. So what is the exposure of an organization? Internal, external, cloud. There are so many entry points. If you go back 5, 6 years ago, the entry points was infrastructure on-prem or a website or a web application. That's about it. But today you have cloud, you have workloads, you have databases, uh, on-prem. So many entry points are out there. So if you ask me, it is exposure management from the bad guys.

And so you provide a, a broader array of exposure management services to companies that need that kind of protection?

Yep. On a platform. So it's a tech-enabled solution that we offer.

I got it. Okay. So you've got a software as a service you're offering on, in the cloud. People subscribe to it.

Yes.

And then—

Absolutely.

And then people subscribe to the service and then that, that offers them protection in a whole bunch of different ways. Yep. So what would be a typical client for Securon?

Typically, we were fortunate that we got enterprise customers, but we want to target the segment that's below enterprise. We want to make security upsize also. So any, anyone from like a bank, a state agency, it could be a hospital, anywhere data is digital, there are customers. So data centers, software companies, hardware companies, all of these are customers.

And you're working below enterprise level.

We are working enterprise and below enterprise level. So we have state of New Mexico, all the state agencies are our customers. State of Washington, Equinix, the largest data center. So we have enterprise-grade customers. At the same time, we have customers like hospitals, right? Banks.

And I'm curious, how many people do you have in your company now?

So we're a little over 200.

Oh, that's pretty good. And it started out with just 2?

Yeah, we started off 2, but mostly at most of the time we were at 20, but then we saw opportunity and we started growing the company. We were very careful, traditionally very conservative. So we never looked at top line. We never actually focused on hiring aggressively. We always made sure bottom line drove our business.

And how do you find yourself spending your day, your days as the CEO?

Meeting customers. I spend a lot of time connecting with them, trying to understand, go meet with them, ask them what is working. How can we do better? And the actual customer rep or the analyst who's working with them, are they able to communicate what it is or are they having to do multiple rounds? What is it they'd like to see on the software platform? So I just hear them out.

So that, we'll swing back around to listening to your customers in a few minutes. And as a CEO, are you, are you, do you have a COO or you that handles daily operations?

Yes, I have a COO. Both of us together handle daily operations. There's a channel where all of us are on for any kind of customer feedback or escalations or launches. All of us are on it. It's an all hands always because we're not that formal yet, like a big org. All of us get into the trenches and we work as teams.

So you, are you still coding?

No, not anymore.

You're managing the people who manage the coders probably.

Yes. Yes. That's right.

There you go. And so you say a lot of time is spent with customers. How much time is spent doing internal management and problem solving?

Half the time.

Okay.

So I allocate, yeah, allocate morning half for internal things. Afternoons is when I go out and meet customers.

And then, and then, okay. So that's how you allocated your time.

Allocate. Yeah.

Absolutely. So what is it? You've been doing this for a while now. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

New problems, solving new problems. Every time I think that, yes, we've got a good solution or we're able to address this, there's something else that comes up. New technology. It was blockchain. Now it is AI. So now everybody says, how is AI enabling your product? I say that, hey, first thing, you need cybersecurity for AI and you need AI for cybersecurity. So how are we addressing that is how do we test AI models that are out there? And how am I incorporating that AI model into my platform? So this is very exciting. We're talking about studying, analyzing the different models incorporating into the product. And we have to be very quick and very swift. And we hope that it'll be on the platform by end of this year, latest by Q1 of next year.

Wow.

So we want a customer to be able to log into platform, type in simple plain English, hey, I read this ransomware. And it should come back and say, what is the context of that ransomware in their environment with one vulnerability? What software? And gives them the whole history. So we want to make it simple.

The AI that you are going to be incorporating in your platform will be able to analyze, give the customers answers to questions on cybersecurity threats that they might have.

Yep.

Based on the customer's platform and known usage.

Yes.

And will it then offer up a solution? This is, these are the steps you need to take to solve the problem.

Yes, we'll, we'll address how it should be addressed, what it should, what should they do to fix, and they have actionable intelligence that they can take control of.

So just stepping outside of cybersecurity for a minute, what's your prognostication? What do you think is going to happen with AI over the next 5 years?

Like how digitization happened, the internet took off, a lot of departments across the globe, state agencies have digitization, like records were digitized, They've become electronic, your driving license, all these things, right? There's a thing that's going to happen called AI-ization. So all enterprises will automate repetitive jobs using AI. So people will have to upskill. A lot of routine things will be addressed by AI. Your preferences, what are your habits? All these things will be known, which will make a very efficient way you can serve your customer. So AI-ization is something that's going to be very big, and that's a big business model by itself. Where you've deployed, let's say, 20 engineers, you might end up doing it with 1 or 2 engineers. Wow. Or not just engineers. Where you had a workforce of 30, 40 people, you'll be able to do that with fewer people. So all these people will be managing AI. They won't be doing what they're doing, but they'll be managing AI. Wow.

That sounds like it's a cat— a big cataclysm, cataclysmic, earth-shaking change.

It sounds like that, but no, unemployment will not be there if people— that's what they're worried about. People will be employed, but they'll have to upskill themselves, like how it happened 20 years ago when computerization happened.

So people have to go back to school and reeducate themselves?

Absolutely.

Huh. So What is it, Ram, that you think is unique about you that you bring to the table that has made Securon so successful?

I think we hear our customers and we try to bring everything onto a platform where they can see it. As a company, our goal is trying to see if we can answer their questions the way they want it to be seen. For example, there could be a CISO or a CIO who says that this is What is going to make me successful in front of my boss? And this is what I need. And we want to make sure that the minute he gets onto the platform, he's able to see that information and he can just walk in with his iPad or laptop and then start projecting it. He doesn't have to go out and do a presentation or anything like that. So making it as easy as possible for them, basically taking their job and solving and doing their job.

So you're able to, but I'm thinking, I'm curious about, that's what Securian does, but what is it about you personally? Okay, that's unique.

Me personally? Yeah. So I listen, but by, by nature, I think I have it. And I'm very patient. I listen, and I process it. And I generally don't give out an answer. I sleep over everything. I'll come back the next day.

So where do you learn?

That helped me a lot so many times. Pardon?

I said, where did you learn how to listen?

I think that's a gift that I have, because sometimes when I didn't listen, or when I was in a haste in my earlier days, and then when I go back and I reflect on that decision, I feel that I should have just thought about it, and I just self-learn.

So when you're listening Let me, let's suppose you got a junior person in your organization and you wanna teach them how to listen the way that you, what would you say to them?

Data. Because I tell them, always make sure you have data and that will give you the answers. So no point in just jumping to a conclusion. Today, data is available. If you go back 10 years, you didn't have all the data. It was not easy to get the data. But today, if anybody's having a conversation with me, I'll just listen. And sometimes we'll just say, let's come back and review the data, and that'll give us all the answers.

It's interesting you should talk about listening for data because I teach people how to listen to emotions, and I tell them that emotions are data, just like numbers on a spreadsheet. And the only problem is that we've never been taught how to look at emotions as data, and therefore we miss 99% of it. Which gets us into trouble. But once you understand how to structure emotional data in your brain, now you can hear it, respond to it appropriately, and stop fights and arguments forever. That makes sense.

Very interesting what you said. It makes total sense, total sense, because you're actually listening to someone when there's a conflict or when somebody is aggressive. Just by my facial expressions or my body language I can make sure that they get that I'm listening and I am understanding what they're saying. You can also at the same time make sure that they're ignored, but it's very important to have that body language make them feel comfortable. What you said makes total sense.

That's right. And it's not only body language and facial expression, which are critical. You actually tell people what their emotions are. So I'd say, Ram, you are really angry. You're frustrated. You feel completely disrespected and ignored. You're not being heard, and you're unappreciated, supported, and the whole thing makes you really nervous and anxious. So just by naming the emotions that somebody else is experiencing, they feel deeply heard and validated, and they relax and they calm down. And now you can engage in a conversation around problem solving. What's the problem? What do we need to do to fix this?. But unless you have the ability to look at data as emotions, to, to look at emotions as data and reflect those emotions, we tend to go into early—

you've seen— absolutely.

What happens when you go into early problem solving with somebody who's upset? Does that ever work?

Yeah, you just have to be quiet. Yeah, just be quiet.

That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. Thinking about emotions as data is a really powerful powerful tool for people. And they're not used to it because no one's ever taught us how to listen to emotions. We just think emotions are whatever they are. And no one's ever really understood. Most people have never taken the time to study the science of emotion and what's going on in our brain and our body. And, and so that's what I teach. And it's—

and with remote work today where people interact with people very less, that becomes a bigger problem when you start interacting with people.

That's right. And having the ability to listen to people at this very deep level.

Yep.

Becomes a foundational skill of success because now you can relate to people at a very deep level. You're talking to a customer, for example, and you detect the slightest bit of frustration or upset with a customer and you say, huh, you're a little frustrated and upset. Tell me what's going on. Just by saying that opens them up and they'll open up and tell you. And if you, but if you didn't hear that, And you'll miss it, right?

Absolutely. This happened to me last week. I was with a customer. As soon as we went, I asked them, tell us what works, what doesn't work. They just started off saying that we're finding the second part of the platform not useful at all. Listen to them completely. And after that, I said that the second part of the platform is something you don't have access to. That's why you're not able to see the data. All of the data is embedded into the first part where you log in. You can see all of that. And then they realize, oh, very apologetically, completely we misunderstood.

It was just obviously a misunderstanding.

Yeah, yeah.

Obviously listening is very important to you. How do you, in your company culture, how do you impress on all of your people the importance of being a good listener?

I, that is one thing I think from a communication perspective I'm not there yet on how they should do. We're still at a phase where we want to solve problems. We are moving so fast. The respective managers, we have this program where they have ability to go to classes online. They can get these coaches online, first-time manager. So the respective managers put them on these things where unlimited subscription, they can do yoga, they can subscribe to all of these things. So they're doing it independently with their manager, but there's no formal way of communication. We have meditation in our India office. So somebody comes in and and they teach them just how to meditate once a month.

Excellent. Where, where are you based out of?

Chennai, India, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. That's our headquarters here.

India and Albuquerque. So you have a bunch of people over in— you get home to India very often?

Yeah, I do. In the past I used to make a lot more trips, but this, I just wanna make it 3 times a year. Too much of travel there is not doing very good with the health and jet lag.

Yeah, it's a long 2-day flight, isn't it?

24-hour.

Yeah, pretty rough.

Yeah.

You still have family in India?

I do.

So at least you get over—

my parents live there, my sister lives there. Yeah.

But good, you get over and do some business and see the family, so that's a good thing. So Ram, one last question, I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Okay, I'm very easygoing, very friendly. I like to do a lot of things apart from work when I'm off work. I like to listen to music, go to concerts, fast cars, something which people don't know.

Wow. So you love listening to music. Are you a musician yourself?

Yeah, no, I listen to all kinds of music, all languages.

Good for you. You might be interested in knowing that I'm a jazz violinist.

I love jazz.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

Really fun to play on the violin.

When are you going to play next? Where are you going to play?

Oh, I don't perform yet. I haven't performed in years. I just, I play it for my own enjoyment more than anything else. So sit out on my deck in the mountains and just depending upon the day, either I'm on my electric acoustic and put on a track and just play along. It's fun.

Yeah, I, my, my younger daughter, she learned and she plays the guitar. I keep telling her that's on my bucket list. Someday I'm going to start learning the guitar and I'm going to start playing. Yeah.

Good for you. Yeah. Graham, I really enjoyed our conversation. I know my audience really picked up a lot from you. So thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you for your time. Thank you very much and appreciate it. Truly honored to be on your show.

Oh, you're welcome. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com. DougNoll.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.