Keeping the School Community Safe with Ross Young

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host Neil Bloom, San Diego's Tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle. This segment is brought to you by Cox Edge. Our longtime partnership with Cox Business has helped their engineering teams develop new tech products for small businesses and startups. Cox is investing in Edge capabilities and working with developers and engineers across the ecosystem to deliver ultra low latency compute solutions, helping customers to improve application performance and to reduce cloud transport and on premise infrastructure costs. Interested in hearing more about Cox Edge? Please visit coxedge.com and mention Neil Bloom or freshbroodtech.com for our partner discount.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neal Bloom and I am joined by Ross Young, SVP of Linewise. Hey Ross, thanks for joining the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Neil. Appreciate it. You're a legend in the San Diego tech scene. So happy to talk to a local legend.

We love talking to local tech leaders as well too. Do you want to give us a quick overview of what Linewise is?

Yeah, definitely. So Linewise is a publicly traded company out of Australia that focuses on keeping kids safe online. From the edge of the network at a school district level down to the parents fingertips and helping parents digitally Parent better. We have multiple products that we deliver this with.

Oh, super interesting. We are going to dive deep into this. Got to imagine the pandemic has thrown this completely for a loop of securing and making sure our kids are safe. So I'm excited to hear about all about this, especially me with an ed tech background. But let's get to know you a little bit, Ross. Like where'd you grow up, where are you from and how did you find yourself in the tech world?

Yeah, so grew up in San Francisco Bay area tech hub, a little outside across the bay from Silicon Valley, so East Bay. And got into tech really right after the crash of 2008 when the mortgage industry, you know, kind of started to dry up. Found myself in a tech role, you know, trying to kind of survive or get through the next phase of my career. Started off at a startup and it's kind of all she wrote in tech and I've been in it ever since.

And has it been mostly sales? Has that kind of been your focus coming up through tech?

Yes.

Okay. I got to imagine sales through the mortgage industry. You know, that fire burning over there. Probably a welcome world in the tech world. Looking for people who knew how to do sales pretty well. What was that like? Kind of the early days just coming over and transitioning to the tech world?

Well, it was overwhelming, I think people who aren't in the tech world. When you start to learn a little bit about the tech world, you realize how much you don't know. You realize you think you're great from a PC perspective operating your own technology. And then you start to get into enterprise grade technology and networking and SSL decryption. You realize that nobody can know it all. It's daunting. It really humbles you.

Yeah. But then also on the sales side also it's interesting in the tech world how many people know the tech side but don't actually know like formal sales. And so marrying those two together is actually a really big deal.

Right. The folks that can communicate very well, that also understand the technical side of the house are the most powerful, effective and rare. Right. You know, on one end of the spectrum you have a developer that can write and see oftentimes some of the social skills to get to that expert level. Some of the social skills sometimes aren't, aren't the best when communicating with C level executives. And you know, really persuading them with technical concepts. Right. Can be difficult for them. And then sometimes on the sales, on the sales side you get folks that have sold lots of different Types of products that were technical and they struggle to learn the complexities of technology. But if you can pair those both right together and constantly be a student of your profession, very powerful.

Absolutely. And sounds like that's what's led you to here, to running line wise, at least North America of it, which is pretty cool. Take us through kind of your journey through the tech world. Like, how'd you end up in San Diego?

Yeah, definitely. So I visited San Diego as a child of a blended family, if you will. My father was Navy pilot and I used to come visit him as a child. And so when I grow up, which I'm not sure I've done yet, but I said when I grow up, I want to live in San Diego. And I had an opportunity actually on my 21st birthday, I moved down to San Diego. Kind of an interesting story. My wife and I had a six month old. It's my 21st birthday. We loaded up the U Haul that I strapped to the bottom of our Chevy Venture van and headed south with a couple thousand bucks in my pocket and a lease to come down here. And we actually broke down on the grapevine with the trailer. We overheated. So it's my 21st birthday and I had a small little barbecue in there. I pulled the barbecue out on the side of the grapevine, grilled up a piece of linguica and actually had a beer on the side of the grapevine on my 21st birthday. That's my story.

I love that you're already ready to cook those taco meats, that's for sure.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. I'm Portuguese, so translates well Little Latin in me. Love. I do love tacos. Yes.

Yeah, it sounds like you eventually made it to San Diego, so that's good for everyone. What was it like landing in san Diego at 21 looking for. I don't know, were you looking for the tech role already or were you kind of searching?

No. So what brought me down here, actually I started in sales was really selling vacuum cleaners door to door. And I negotiated a deal with a vendor down here for Kirby Vacuum Cleaners and brought two reps down here to, you know, make overrides on and myself and figured if I can make it down to San Diego, support my family for long enough and find a role where I could be financially successful here, then I'll stay, I'll be here. Right. It's very difficult, I think, for a lot of folks that are outside of the area to make it there, but ultimately, yeah, Brought some folks down here, negotiated a deal, supported the family and started looking for other opportunities. Ended up after the crash into technology.

Got it. And I know you came to be with iBoss, which is a bit of a legendary San Diego tech company as well. Was that kind of the first blush with the cybersecurity world?

Yes, it was. And at the time they were called IBOSS Web Filters and there was a startup, it was in end of 2011, you know, right after, as the recovery was happening, I, I literally put my resume on Craigslist. It was a frenzy right from a resume on Craigslist. And I got a call from Peter Martini, you know, a co founder of iBoss, and brought me in for an interview. And it was tiny little office, maybe five people there. And he offered me the role. I was one of the first two salespeople for iBoss. Previously it was Peter Martini and Paul Martini, legendary twins, selling and deploying the product and they wanted to expand and I was part of that first expansion.

Oh, that's pretty cool. Especially to have watched it grown all the way up to that office over in what UTC area. I remember with the slide, that was the big thing.

The slide was big. Yeah, definitely. That was a really fun journey and they're still doing very well.

That's great to hear. Well, obviously great to grow up with a company like that, learn a lot of skills, wear a ton of hats and learn one of San Diego's deep industries, which is the cyber world. So great to dive deep into one of our specialties here. One curious to know here what that felt like being a part of the cybersecurity world. Did you feel like there was an ecosystem here locally in San Diego? And then how did that kind of lead towards linewise?

I was totally ignorant to the space. So it was a wet, you know, I said to myself, what is a web filter? You know, cybersecurity. And that's really kind of how it started. But yeah, I was, I was pretty ignorant to the space. Came in and was really overwhelmed by the technology. I actually almost walked out of there my third day because I was pretty intimidated by the amount of knowledge that I needed. But, you know, obviously very happy I stuck it out. But it was, I took it as really as a challenge to learn the technology. And I said to myself, to really sell something effectively, we have to believe in it, right? And own it internally. So I went on a mission to get myself technically sound so that I could communicate and talk the language with the industry. The people that I was going to be influencing. That was, you know, a bit of a steep learning curve but ultimately it proved successful and we went. When I, when I started, I believe we were a little under 2 million in revenue. And by the time I got out of there I was employee 8 and by the time I got out of there we had well over 350 employees, had offices nationwide and were partnered with a special fund by Goldman Sachs.

Wow.

Yeah, that we worked through and became a market share leader in the space in ed tech for content filtering at that time.

Wow, that's pretty great to be at the front seat of that growth. So take us through a little bit of line wise. Like how so Australian company, how and when did it, you know, kind of make it stateside and what's the, what's its focus and growth been like here since it's been in the States?

Yeah, definitely. So I was recruited directly from iboss. They were looking for somebody who was familiar with The North American EdTech Content Filtering Market, which is very niche specific, that could lead them from really kind of a product led growth type of an approach into North American market. The name of the company at the time was Family Zone and it doesn't really sound like an enterprise cybersecurity product. Right, right. So I, I first, you know, kind of denied them and said, you know, this doesn't, I'm not sure if this really lines with my career, where I'm at, where I'm going and they're persistent and so we want you to take a look at our product. So I took a look at the product. It was actually a recent acquisition that they had made out of New Zealand where they were selling to school districts there. And the strategy for them was to sell to school districts to ultimately get to the parent community to sell a home content filter to the parents through school influence. So the name of the company was Family Zone. They bought line wise for this strategy and they wanted somebody to permeate the North American edtech market. I looked at the product, found it interesting, needed some changes to it and then I actually had some close friends in the space that are CIOs of school districts across the country. A couple of them, they said hey, I'm interviewing for this company, can you take a look at a tech? I want to make sure it can scale to your size of organization. One of them was, well, leave nameless was about 35,000 students in the southeastern U.S. he tested the product, you know, for me, said hey things really interesting. I decided to take the role on July 1, 2018 to lead them into North America.

That's awesome.

Yeah. Now it was really important for me to take the role was that we could really apply the customer and the product led growth strategy. So I needed influence across and really kind of control of what are we going to put in the product that our customer base needs. So leading product strategy, being able to hire who I need to hire and make those decisions and then ultimately you know, at some point on the P and L of North America. So that was agreed to and there's a lot in between there. But we're three years in and quarter billion raised in the last two years and really driving strong.

That's great. It's such an important product. Just as obviously content is finding new ways to get to the end users, which is good and bad.

Right, Right.

So super important around just making sure our kids are protected.

Right.

Especially during the pandemic when device management just went completely up in the air. Right. Like any device in front of us. Fine, great. Whatever is easy home on the couch compared to whatever we were using before. So what's that been like? What's the pandemic done for the industry?

Well, first of all, it's been a catalyst for explosion of growth across it. Right. When there's a global device shortage, everything turned online, school turned up. If technology was down or if a student didn't have a device they couldn't learn, everything was locked down. And with that there's federal regulatory compliance that if you receive money from the federal government, you're legally required to block pornography. Right. So our position was there's all of these devices out there. A lot of the legacy solutions required on PREM equipment and hardware and we could deploy directly in the cloud. For example, Temecula Unified and Marietta Unified. Right. Very close to us, reached out Temecula specifically and said, we have 27,000 Chromebooks we just bought and we don't want to backhaul all this data. Right. We need protection on them now. We deployed them in two hours to keep those kids safe. So the deployment modality was the pandemic. You know, as tough as it's been on a lot of people, it's kind of a perfect storm for our business moving forward. And what, you know, one of the other problems with the pandemic is that the mental health problems that have come from it, from children, has exploded. So for example, our technology uses AI NLT, machine learning to look for early indicators of self harm, school violence, depression, you know, hate speech. Right. And it can detect that information and alert folks we watched those alerts go up by over 300% during the pandemic. Wow. Across the board. So anyways, it's the pandemic. Good for our business. Very eye opening for what's going on, you know, in our children's minds.

Super important. Actually this month is National Suicide Prevention Month. So it's kind of timely to talk about mental health awareness. And we actually just put out an episode around how to kind of be aware and look for that within your own workforce, especially the entrepreneurs and the kind of the leaders who, you know, don't always have someone looking out for them just as much the same. Obviously you guys are looking out for our kids. Super important. So thank you for that.

Yeah, it's important mission.

So take us through. You know, obviously you've weathered this catalyst. Like what's on the horizon, what are you kind of building and where are you headed? Looking forward.

Yeah, definitely. So we've in the past 90 days we've made two acquisitions. So we're publicly traded. So we went to the market and a discounted rate, raised some capital. We acquired the market share leader in the uk. The name of the company is called smooth wall for 146 million. So that really helped bring our total students protected globally around 9.1 million. And then we also acquired an up and coming kind of startup classroom management product called Netref out of Washington D.C. area and acquired their customers as well. And we now have seven different product lines that we can bring to our space. Everything from a firewall, from the Smooth Wall side for smaller organizations, down to a parent application where they can see what their kids are doing online at Scope. And then we've now partnered it with an education platform to help school districts educate their community about how to keep their kids safe online. We put it together in a package, so we have these components now. The acquisition is very fresh, so we're really working through how do these products integrate and talk together to deliver the outcomes that we want to provide. Right. So there's a lot of integrating via API, there's a lot of development, you know, effort and planning going on. Then from a sales packaging perspective, how do we talk to the Smooth Wall customers that think they only have one piece of the pie, the Net Rep customers and our own current customers then let them know that their product lines have grown, you know, to four, five, six products. So, you know, a lot of times in SaaS, it's about NRR growth, right? So it's how can we help our existing customers accomplish those goals and how can we grow revenue through additional product line? Right, so we're mapping all that out together and threaten today I'm actually in Charlotte at the Smooth Wall US Headquarters mapping out with our department heads in North America on how we're going to integrate all the customers and the tech into our business.

It's exciting times integrating companies and cultures. It's a big deal bolting them together and seeing how everyone works together. So super exciting. Congrats on that.

Thank you. A lot of work.

Yeah, for sure. Just how about some, like, some tips for people cybersecurity wise? Because we know that you can build the best tech in the world, but it also, if you don't have an educated user, sometimes user error is the trump card there that lets in whatever it is that isn't supposed to be there. So how do you pair those together? The right tech plus the right education of the end user.

So if you don't mind, I'll spin that a little bit on keeping, you know, kind of kids safe online from a cyber security perspective. You know, a lot of the obvious things of not keeping the same password, right, rotating your passwords regularly, you know, my wife would prefer it was this way. We kept the same password for all of our different logins, but you obviously can't do that for certain reasons. So from that side, but ultimately I'd like to move it into. In this new world of screen time, right. How do you keep your kids safe online from a cyber safety perspective, you know, and really setting boundaries around, you know, how many hours a day realistically and thinking about this and mapping out how many hours a day is my child in front of a screen and making parental decisions to say, how long do I believe it's acceptable for my child to be in front of a screen and having the technology to peer into? Well, where are they going online when they are in there that long online? Who are they potentially communicating with? Right, from a potential predator through the screen in your, in your child's room and making sure that there's, that you can have a say before the Internet does and speaks to your child. So I think that's really important to think they're in and, you know, everybody's buying their. The average, you know, age of a child having a phone or device is eight years old. And a lot of parents are handing them a device as a babysitter and there's, there's a lot of danger there. I don't think a lot of parents think through that.

Interesting. That's great to think through. You're right screen time, not just like what is it doing developmentally but every minute more is a potential for that much more to kind of come into good and bad come to the kid as well, I guess to all of us. So super important to think through where within San Diego as well. What's growth like for line wise and kind of what are you looking forward to within being in Southern California over the next few years?

Yeah, great question. So we've, we're bursting at the seams of our current office space in Rancho Bernardo. So we're actively seeking a larger office at this particular stage. So we're looking to expand. We're looking to, you know, hopefully move downstairs to in triple R square footage or we'll be seeking kind of a new place and a new build out. But San Diego is really our sales and marketing function, I would say for the North American operation. And because of all the additional customers we have additional products. We're heavily expanding our sales organization at this time.

That's exciting. Yeah, love to see office growing as well too, especially during these kind of uncertain times. So that's a great sign for you guys, you know and sounds like you're staying, staying put. Which the biggest thing for that, staying put in Rancho Bernardo, which means your lunch spots are going to stay and we know if you have a go to taco spot, it's hard to leave that. Even though we know there's a taco spot within a stone's throw of anywhere. Do you have a favorite like go to or do you have a whole bunch?

I do, I have a specific favorite. But I also love an additional category of taco which is Marisco in San Diego. Being so close, I have to have to include that.

Of course. Tell us, give it, give us the down low.

So when people come to visit, I tell them best tacos in North America, not just San Diego. Best tacos in North America are at a place up in Escondido on Valley Parkway called TJ Tacos.

Oh yeah, legendary.

Oh, phenomenal. When they, when they moved in there, I heard about it. I, I had to make a trip over there. And the average line now is no, probably 45 minutes to get a taco. But there's a, there's a hack, there's a pro tip. The pro tip is when you're on your way up there, you call in your order, you tell them what you want. When you get there, it's ready and you just grab a table, skip the line.

Good tip.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah. No, and on The Modisto side. There's a place again, Escondido. It's got to be the name or something. But Escondido has a place called Fortunas, if you've heard of that.

I don't think we have. It's a good, good new one.

It is phenomenal. Very fresh seafood. They bring out some fish broth while you wait there. Mexican style fish broth. The tacos. The fish is so fresh. The ingredients are fresh and they have a lot of options. I believe they have around 10 different types of mariscos, tacos that are there. And ceviche. Get me started on ceviche.

No good. Two hidden gems apropos for Escondido, Fortunas and TJ Tacos. Adding them to our taco database. I'm sure TJ Tacos have been brought up before, but not Fortunas, so love that one. Thanks.

Yeah.

Well, this was great, Ross. Really appreciate getting to know you, your story and your kind of noble cause that you guys are doing with Linewise. So thank you. Congrats on the growth and we're wishing you guys all luck in the expansion.

We appreciate that. Thank you very much. Neil, it's been a pleasure. Look forward to meeting you in person at some point as well.

Over some tacos or ceviche?

Absolutely. Both on it.

All right, thanks, Ross.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem.

Big shout out to Sand School of.

Rap for our rad intro music. And this podcast is edited and mixed by Patrick Norton at citizenrecording.com you can find Neil Bloom on Twitter NeilBloom and on LinkedIn as well as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos in tech pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos in tech, you know we got it.

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