Providing the Right Tools and Services to Help Small Businesses Grow With Jared Ruth and Tim Ellis of Cox Business

Startups get the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador cuentan frijoles founders trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded when San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am thrilled to have you here on the Tacos and Tech podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview, and on Fridays, we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well, too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I am so thrilled to have my friends here from Cox Business, like longtime friends here. Jared Ruth, Tim Ellis. Guys, thanks for being on the pod.

Neil, thanks for having us back, man. We're excited to be here.

Absolutely. It all started. Yeah, no, it all. This podcast all started. A bit of a genesis between your team, Todd Backus, and you, Jared. And here we are almost four years later building an ecosystem. Who would have thought? So I'm excited to kind of nerd out a little bit on where the ecosystem's at, especially with some of the companies who we've been hosting at dinners for four years who are really starting to have some traction now. Right. So I'm excited to talk through some use cases and new problems that companies are seeing even though they're finding success as they grow. So let's dive into a little bit of, like, what you guys have been working on over the last year.

Right.

Cox Cloud has kind of become a new area of focus under Cox Business. Jared, you want to take us through a little bit on your subject matter area that you're focusing on right now?

Yeah, sure. So again, excited to be here. It's hard to believe it's been four years, but yeah, we've been very busy. So not only through expanding our, our existing portfolio, but also acquiring new capabilities. And you know, I think the biggest thing is the business environment and climate has changed so much in the last two years. I just, I can't even think, you know, back to what it was like before when we weren't using, you know, Zoom or Microsoft Teams or insert SaaS application in where, you know, what we were using two years ago. But you know, there's been so much change and I think what's been really fun, especially when I think about the startup companies in San Diego and sort of where they were four years ago and where they've come. So much of that growth has been in the SaaS space and we've, we've really, I think as we've expanded our portfolio, it's filled critical needs not only in the startup space, but in the mid market and enterprise side of things. And it's just been a really nice organic way to grow and for everybody. And so I think when we think about our new, our newest products in the market, a lot of it's in the cloud, but we're also, I think this gave us a real great opportunity to also improve our core services around connectivity. We saw a significant increase in bandwidth need. Right. As schools went to helm and employees started working from home and in mobile environments. And so it just kind of gave us the ability to reset and do a lot across the board as it relates to connectivity all the way to cloud type services.

Got it. And a company like COX, which is 120, what, three, four years old now, obviously has spanned such a long time that not only has invested for the long time, which we've often talked about, but has seen some huge ups and downs in the business environment too, that theoretically, you know, this is what the pandemic did is kind of built into the genes to be a bit a dampening effect. Right. It's like, yep, things are changing but man, this company's obviously been there through that. What was that like? Just for a company to, to say, hey, we've got some history and rolling with the times.

Well, it was fascinating because when this whole thing first happened, our, our CEO Alex Taylor, who is the great grandson of James Cox, our founder, who founded the company in 1898. He was talking about the Spanish flu and how this was a time that the company went through the Spanish flu in the 1920s and how they persevered through that. But, you know, one of the things I always think about when you think about a company that's been, you know, around this long, you have to be great innovators. Right. You have to always be thinking about market trends, where things are going. And so I think some of your listeners may not know, but we are as far as Cox Enterprise, also significant own significant operations in the auto industry industry around Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader and. And Mannheim Auto auctions and probably 30 other brands that, that we are involved in there. But then also getting heavily involved in clean tech and a lot of other environmental things, also esports. I mean, there's a long list, as you know of Neil, of things that we're involved in, but that's really. It's about constantly reinventing yourself and enabling new technologies to make sure that you can span that length of time.

Absolutely.

Would you add anything there, Tim?

No, I. Honestly, I think you. You hit the nail on the head. I mean, that's really it. The forefront is we focus on our customers. That's really the biggest thing. And pay attention to market trends and just what's going on out there. It's kind of that mentality of, you don't want to talk at your customers, you want to talk with your customers. We're in it. We're in the community. We live, breathe and work with our community. So it's really doing things that's based on the community and based on our customers and really delivering a quality product and service to them. I mean, I think that's a big contributor and kind of what's one of our big core fundamentals as well.

Yeah, And Cox has made a big investment in time and financially in the startup space. Right. Having its own techstars program and like corporate venture fund in Atlanta, and we've leveraged that here in Southern California. So let's talk a little bit about kind of that application into the startup world, because not all of our listeners even understand all things startups, to be honest. So here's a little bit of some background about how startups get up and running, and then we're going to inject in here where there's tipping points or where startups all of a sudden are operating differently, which is a way that Cox ends up interacting with them. In a few different ways as well too. Um, you know, when you are a idea stage two person, maybe startup, it's maybe by night and you're maybe, well, hopefully you're not using your company's Internet to do any of your work. You're hopefully using it only at home so they don't have any claims to your ip. And at some point you, the startup finds a little bit of traction from the idea. Maybe it's some wannabe customers that say, I'm in when you're ready, when you have product. And maybe the startup founders rip the band aid off and go all in on it. Right? And so those early days, those are usually the garage hacking days that we talk about of yesteryear, though I guess we were back at it during COVID we all were working from the garage. And you keep, you keep hustling to the point of getting some kind of traction, whatever that means, whether it's some kind of revenue and you're testing out revenue models a bunch, right, to see what sticks. And at some point revenue starts to become a bit repeatable, right? You can consistently say that the customers are, they're signing up and they're renewing, right? And so you can start to show that, hey, we've got repeatable revenue of some sort. People are coming back, they like our service. And usually what that means is that you can take your, your foot off the gas a little bit on sales and start to poke around on a few other pieces of the business of what could use help, whether that's marketing, tech and everything else. So I would love to have that kind of conversation right here around what you've seen companies doing in that when that big change happens, right? And all of a sudden they've got a business, not just an idea and some product that they're building, who wants to take a first crack on kind of the transition inside a company, what you're seeing.

I can take that, Neil. So, so what I love about what you said is, is the start that how you start, right? And that's usually when we get our first taste, our first interaction with the customer. It's almost never B2B type relationship or business relationships. It's almost always a cable modem sitting in somebody's house and phone services and, you know, even television services. And you know what I love about that, you and I have talked about it a lot, is we're enabling that to happen initially through a residential or a commercial, through a, through a type of consumer interaction, right? But the thing that's really neat. As we see these businesses scale, they move out of their, their home into a facility. They get, whether it's seed money or they get maybe a Series A or something, all of a sudden there's these doors just start opening up. As a startup, whether it's a founder or a team, you have some really important decisions to make around how you're going to take use that money. Because candidly, although it may seem like a lot, when you get the check, it goes pretty fast. And I think, I think most people out there, you know, that would resonate. So yeah, you start thinking about, okay, well how do, maybe it's initially you're trying to get more inventory or maybe you're trying to expand your operations or move into a space or get some, somebody who can help you, you know, grow the business. A lot of times I think about the technical side only because that's our business. See this probably struggle more than anything right now. Right. Because what's happened in the last two years is the, the need and requirement around tech has just accelerated exponentially. When you think about the cybersecurity side of things and you think about the mobility side of things and you think about everything moving into a lot of things, moving into a SaaS based architecture. So that's where the most of the acceleration has been. And that's honestly some of the most expensive things you're going to have to think about. Because you don't go go out and just hire a security expert for $60,000 a year. You don't go hire a security expert for $200,000 a year. It's far north of that. So as you start to think about your stack and then ultimately maybe making capital investments in infrastructure and all these other things, you have to really start thinking about, okay, how do we find a solution where we can find the expertise, but we also get what we need to run and scale our business and keep the cost at more of a monthly premium more than trying to invest several million dollars in a capital outlay, which unfortunately you tie up all your series funding just on that alone. So, so that's what's been neat about this space is really helping, helping customers learn how to prioritize that spend and then making sure that they don't get all their money locked up in technology that they have money to spend in other parts of the business, including marketing and INV and all the other really important operational components of their business. Super critical.

Yeah, yeah, I want to direct it to Tim in a second. But a lot of the Stuff on the tech side, we sometimes call it like tech debt. Right. Things that you've put off and been like, you know what, we know we need that. And maybe when you're first starting sales, you're selling more to SMB, small and medium sized businesses. And so they aren't necessarily looking under the hood and being how secure is the business. Do you have cyber insurance, all these things. But as you start having success in your early sales, you start going for bigger companies, maybe toeing the line on enterprise, hopefully trying to sell even Cox to be a customer as well too. And now you start having to really show that you have at least a handle or you're aware of the areas you need to spend money on. And Tim, I know you can definitely speak a little bit to the cyber side. Like how important is that piece for a startup to get a handle on early on?

First off, it's crucial. I mean the biggest thing is we want these startups, these organizations, they're excited, they have a new product, they're going to market, they got a really cool go to market strategy and we want them to focus on that. We don't want them to be focusing on it and making sure they're secure. That's that you got to give 100% focus, especially when you're in startup mode. So the reality is those are the ones that are prime targets. Your SMB space, your startup customers, they are prime targets for, let's say ransomware attacks happen every 12 seconds and it affects at a minimum of 70% of your small business space. The reason why don't have a robust IT team, you don't have, you may not even have an IT team. So the reality is, and what would be the biggest just catastrophic thing would be for a small startup with a great billion dollar idea to go out of business within the first six months. Say an organization's hit six months with a ransomware attack, they click that wrong link, they have that billion dollar idea that hacker gets access to it right away. It's on the auction block on the dark web. Not to mention they're hit with a ransom of say 100 plus thousand dollars. Pay up or else. Okay, let's say they pay up, they've depleted all their funds at that point, are they going to be able to stay afloat? And again, not to mention that the confidential information is floating on the dark web. A lot of organizations, especially smaller and specifically startups, a lot of one can't recoup, they can't get back on their feet after a ransomware attack. And that can literally happen day one just like that. They're happening every 12 seconds. So the nice thing about us, we're going to be the experts, we're going to layer on that defense. So again they know they're secured. We're proactively monitoring and making sure the bad stuff doesn't get into their network walls. They got to focus on their business and keep going up and goal is to be a, you know, a large enterprise and be the next big company out there. So that's, I really look at. We save businesses, we really keep businesses going and make them even more successful.

Yeah, it's a great point. Especially on the ransomware, especially protecting your customers too who also could be small, medium sized businesses who all could get hooked up together. Right. If they get a list of who your customers are, why wouldn't they go after them as well too? So you just, it's an super important to have your company be protected to protect also your customers too because you don't want to burn them as well. That's a great example for sure that companies that may have been pushing that off. What are some other areas that you see especially maybe around and maybe direct this to Jared. Companies have pushed it off up until now. Maybe it's some of the things come to me around it where you've maybe not met with some kind especially the hardware piece. You've been out of office for two, three years now. So no one's maybe upgraded your hardware and you just kind of relied on hopefully home networks are secure as well too. Like what's the, the hardware side that you're seeing companies start to invest in once they reach this point?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I'll take it from a couple of different perspectives. It's a great question. So think about when was the last time you used like your office phone, right? So you got this office phone system and it's in your office. And so that the acceleration of a UCAS or CCAS type solution where now it's, it's pretty much all we use soft phones and that's not the case with every industry. But by and large when we look at our customers, that whole idea of owning your phone system and having these handsets and you know, or a PBX internals you're building, I mean it's almost unheard of in some, in most cases now. But then if you move it into like the infrastructure. We're seeing a really interesting trend Neil, which was for a minute even on the larger Enterprise side, a lot of people shifting into the hyperscalers, you know, going to AWS and Microsoft and Google Cloud, et cetera. And what we're seeing now, I think is kind of interesting is after the pandemic and people are thinking about these hybrid environments, they're saying, okay, yeah, the hyperscalers have a piece of this and there's an important piece there. Not to say that you don't want to use a hyperscaler, but there's also some infrastructure you may want to keep on premium, and there's some that you may want to keep in a managed service provider or, you know, as we just launched Cox Edge, low latency type compute environment, I think there's definitely a move to, you know, we don't want to go invest and buy our own servers necessarily on prem, but there is room for kind of this hybrid environment of different storage and compute functions sitting at different parts of the network, which we're seeing a lot of that happening now. And I think when I think even back to our conversations at our CTO breakfasts and lunches and dinners and our startup dinners, et cetera, I mean, this was essentially how everybody was thinking at the time. It was okay, yes, I'd love to go put everything in the hyperscaler, but unfortunate, it doesn't scale, I can't afford it. So there's almost this hybrid. There was already a hybrid approach taking shape back then.

Yeah. And got to imagine, if AWS was the silver bullet for everyone, they would have everyone be on aws. And that's obviously not the case. There's so many options out there because there's so many different use cases. What are some? Give us a few examples. Maybe even from the SMB world where, you know, they would have thought that, oh, there's like a turnkey solution, I'll just all of a sudden be on Shopify and boom, my store is digital. Like, do you have some examples where people have needed some unique needs with kind of a cloud service environment?

Are we going to take that one, Tim?

No, I could chime in, actually. So here's a perfect example. You know, the hyperscalers are great, but you're really at the portal doing it yourself. And say you're doing a startup company, let's say you' start funding has nothing to do with tech. You're having to go into, let's say the Microsoft Azure Portal, which it's fantastic, it's great, don't get me wrong, but you kind of have to know what you're doing. Are you Going to be building containers, what type of virtual machines, virtual servers, what do I want, what platform do I want, etc? There's so many different things and you can get really lost into it and you can really build something where you're paying through the roof on cost or you've spec certain things out that's not at all what you need. So the unique thing about us, where we really go hand in hand and this, that's where I really feel our niche is those smaller super stretched IT teams or very limited or no IT teams, We're going to sit and consult with them and uncover their actual needs. What exactly do you want to do? How do you want to virtualize your machines? Are they individual users, are they servers? We'll actually work, construct it, architect the design with the customer. All customers are unique, nobody's the same. There is no one size fits all, no cookie cutter approach. We really have to get in deep and learn their business. What do they want, what do they want to accomplish? What's their scalability plan, where do they want to go? And at that point we'll construct an architect, a solution that's going to fit their needs. Not to mention we offer 24, 7 by 365 support. So say you don't ever get off of work, you're not 8 to 5, so it may be 1am on Saturday, guess what, you can pick up the phone, that person answers the phone, it's going to be an actual engineer. We're going to be able to walk them through and get their issue resolved. We're legitimate business partners with our customer base and allow them the latitude to really build a proper IT structure and stack that's going to fit their needs and it's going to be scalable with them as they grow and potentially become a large enterprise customer as well.

Yeah, you actually bring up a good point around the team starting to differentiate. You know, I think up to this point for let's say a tech company per se, the CTO is kind of wearing way too many hats. Right? The CTO was not just building the core technology of the company, they also were probably actually building the public facing website which really maybe should be owned by like marketing, but no one's there to build that part and they're probably doing it as well too. Right. And they're helping people get their laptop set up and saying here's the environment, choosing the environment we're going to be using, whether it's Google, from a even just like work environment, Azure, slack teams, all that and at Some point, they're like, hey, we need to build technology here. We need, I need to unpack all these roles off of my plate. And so you just gave some really great examples there where the CTO can at least unload this. Sometimes you see it where it's like an office admin gets handed a lot of these things as well too, to be IT and other parts as well. What can, what do you think is the right internal hire at this point to manage a team like you guys? Right. Because IT can't just roll up to the CEO. What's a good role for someone? Like, is it a general ops person who's the right person to kind of manage the outsourced services that you guys might be able to bring into the table too?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's interesting when we talk to any business for that matter, I don't care if it's even in the larger side. We. I often ask them, I'm assuming you don't have too many IT people and too much money to work with. And the answer is always like, yeah, absolutely not. It's always something where they're, they're having trouble with resources and keeping up. And then with the great resignation and, you know, everything happening in movement, it's made it even that much more challenging. So, so that's why we see managed service providers like, like we do becoming so popular, because you get that expertise without, you know, necessarily having to own it 247 and pay for it 24 7. Right. So I think if you're looking at who do you need in order to manage that managed services provider? I mean, it's definitely more of an IT generalist in some cases, but I would maybe pivot that question a little bit, Neil, and say maybe it's a little bit more about who you don't need. Right. And what's cool about it is you can chew up a technical person's time, all kinds of hours doing help desk support, for instance. Right. So when you're using a great managed service provider, you don't need a help desk support. You don't need end user help desk support because they can handle that for you. So if you got somebody you're paying who's a technical mind, they get to focus more on strategy and they get to focus more on building the company as opposed to worrying about, you know, printing problems and some of those things. Right. The other side, if you don't aren't paying somebody a significant amount of money to be a security expert, you can rely on a team of security experts that you don't have to pay for. And that person that's got one or two people that are your IT people in your business can again, they can focus on what's critical to growing the business and the technology within the business and their app, Maybe it's a SaaS application or whatever, they can focus on building that rather than worrying about whether they're going to get hit with a ransomware attack if they're thinking about mobile users and enabling a workforce. Less time spent chasing around San Diego running, trying to, you know, fix somebody's laptop in more time. Again, focused on the solution for the business. So the way that I like to see it is it's, it's a force multiplier for your organization. And it's actually, I mean, going back to the case and point about ransomware, I don't want to like scare everybody to death, but the point is that this is something that you can solve. There's some steps that you can put into place that are very easy to put into place and actually aren't that expensive and can eliminate like 95% of your threat as far as that's concerned. Maybe more, probably more. And so I think about it almost like, you know, we have some friends too who do living trusts and things like that in the startup space in San Diego. So I'm going to compare it to them. But it's just that step of saying, man, if you just would have done this, like you would have maybe would have cost you an extra few hundred bucks a month or whatever, but now you're dealing with a million dollar ransomware or ransom and that's just the beginning of it. Like you're just getting started because now they have your data, they have your IP potentially. And so, so that's where I think maybe in some cases less about who you need. I think you need the people to really focus on your business from a technology perspective, whether it's a CTO or some other. But it's more about who now you don't have to think about and the things you don't have to think about because you've got a great partner helping you.

Yeah, that's a good point. Tim, you want to add.

Yeah, I want to add on as well. So, you know, the reality is you want somebody to know at least enough on what they want to, what safeguards they want to have in play and know the ramifications and kind of like to the point of having a CTO focusing on their core business, but at least having a fundamental acknowledgement of what they want to safeguard and protect themselves. Because to Jared's point too, here's the other scary thing with ransomware attacks, and again, I'm going to say with what Jared said, not trying to scare everybody to death, but reality is, once you pay a ransom, the hacker community knows, hey, this person's ready to pay up. So nine out of 10 times, that individual is usually attacked again with a ransomware attack, usually within a few days. I've seen it and I've heard about it within a few hours. So that's the scary thing and that's the problem. If you don't have the safeguards in place, you pay up. You know you're, you're going to get hit again. So it's really, really super crucial you have those safeguards in place to, to avoid that altogether.

What about on the so around that, specifically your data, which is honestly some of the biggest currency for a lot of these companies. Are you seeing like the rise of the CIO way earlier than you would have expected before? Like, is this a chief data officer or just someone head of data that is more that they're owning, not just the hardware and the pipes that's flowing your data for your company, but actually the ownership of it too. Anything trends you're seeing around that from data ownership?

Absolutely, yeah. I think the role of the CIO CTO has completely changed as well. I mean, it's not only earlier, more often, it's the data, it's the data protection. And something that's kind of interesting as we've seen this in the last year to two years, it's the liability around the data. Right. We talk to a lot of CIOs and CTOs and say, hey, look, before if we would have had a data breach, I may have lost my job or my team, somebody on my team may have lost their job, which was a big deal. What's happened more recently though, is there's liability clauses put into some of these terms where it's like, not only can I lose my job, but I can also be held personally liable for the data of this company. Now, man, that's not a game changer. I don't know what is, because that, that's where you go, okay, so this means I could ultimately be facing things above, well, even beyond liability. I mean, there's even things that have happened where there's some criminal investigation put in. I mean, it's gotten really, really scary in some ways to be a cio CTO and, and hats off to them. I, I know a lot of them and you know, I have this conversation all the time with them because it's nerve wracking. You're expected to know such a huge breadth of, of subjects but also, you know, ultimately in some ways be you're being held liable for some of that stuff, which is a whole different game.

So especially with engineers who are off doing things, you know, in support of the company thinking of new innovative solutions and you have no idea what, what websites they're on connecting your data to. That's got to be a little scary as well too.

Yep.

Tim, anything you wanted to add on that?

No, Jared hit the nail on the head. That was exactly a key important thing. With CIOs and CTOs there are a lot of clauses that they're held personally liable. So it's. No, Jared hit it exactly spot on. So just the importance of the data and just the overall compliances of customers and employees data, it's so ever important. And that's where these positions have to really take it into account and take it seriously and set up the proper safeguards and partner with the right organizations to do it. And to your point, data is king. I mean data is what runs organizations. Again, the startup company will go back to them, they may have that next billion dollar idea and they have the plans drafted. I mean that, that is gold in itself. And most important thing, you have to safeguard it.

Especially in software right now where the IP of the idea itself or the technology may actually not be much, may not be very novel. Therefore the data kind of becomes your ip, right. Like how much knowledge do you know about your customer which dictates how you go and design and build the next product or what industry to go in. Like it's either you, it's kind of either or in that sense regard, right. Either you've got something unique on technology or you've got something unique that you know about your customer, which is all data. So super important point there. If a company is. Oh, go ahead.

I was going to say to that point, kind of the trend we're seeing too with ransomware is they'll lock your data, say we have your data move we're seeing more often now is okay, we're going to do an email campaign to your customers and let them all that, all of them know that we have their data. And, and so it's not even just between you and the and who's ever got you from a ransomware perspective now it's become them reaching out proactively to your customers, letting them know that you are the cause of the breach. And so it just, and it just continues to build on that. So it's really, I guess I just say again, it's just really important to think through this stuff and when you think about honestly how little it costs to put in some protections, it's a no brainer. It's really not that hard.

So yeah, and I would imagine let's say you're a 20 or 30 person company still at that series A, you may not, definitely may not have had in your spend plan to hire a cio. Maybe you've got to contract with like a contract CIO CTO in that regard, get a little bit of consultation to then also bring in the right services to enable for this. So sometimes you're actually use, you don't even have the data leader in house. But I've got to imagine you're thinking through who could own that at least not necessarily by title, but start to at least be aware of where our vulnerabilities are and also our liabilities could be and either that's on your next raise.

Right.

So next raise we're ready to have a named titled person who at least will live up to this liability if it happens. But someone's starting to own it already. And so even if it's not by title, maybe there's an engineer or like an architect, senior architect who's kind of added that to their job role even if not by title as well. So those are people that you also want to have connections to managed services so that they know all right, if I, if this isn't my full time job, at least I know I've got, I got someone who's got my back as well too.

That's right. Yeah. And to your point, I mean especially in the San Diego ecosystem there's so many SaaS like type environments. Right. And so to your point, your principal engineers end up becoming your CTOs by default and they're great engineers and that they're there to develop your application or develop your product and you, you can easily tie up all their time doing the work of a CTO or other. And, and it, it's going to definitely slow down your ability to grow your company.

So for sure.

Well and the other thing too, if, if you're okay if you layer on one more thing. So especially with a startup, so many organizations are not building brick and mortar retail stores anymore, it's all about e commerce. So say you avoid the ransomware, all that Stuff you build your website and have your E commerce traction going on. Well, there's another real serious threat called DDoS attacks, distributed denial of service attacks. Basically what that does is it's going to take Internet of thing devices, so your refrigerator, that's a smart device and leverage all of that and just bombard your server and take ultimately take your site down and make you look like you went out of business. The scary thing about the trend of DDoS attacks is back in 2020 there was about 950,000 attacks by 2023, so less than a million in 2020. By 2023 it's estimated to be at 15.4 million attacks.

Wow.

That's a massive uprising to trajectory of that. So that's actually a very scary thing because those DDoS attacks can be kind of a diversion for a ransomware to come in, not to mention taking down your entire e commerce ecosystem as well. So that's another serious threat out there that a lot of organizations don't think about. That you're a startup company with E commerce and people are trying to go to the site. It's going to give the appearance that you went out of business. So just imagine what that's going to do and then the comfortability of people keying in their credit card information on that site knowing they just got hacked. So that's. It goes to so many different levels. And the, just the upward trend of these attacks is just, it's makes you raise your eyebrows, that's for sure.

For sure. And the larger your company, the more success you start having, the bigger target you have on your back as well too. Right. So every day that you grow, you're a bigger target as well. So that's super interesting to think about.

Well, you know, that's an interesting one though. I want to be careful with that one, Neil. Only because we hear a lot of customers and the only reason I'd preface this or jump in there, that say I'm too small for ransomware. Like I, nobody's going to target me. I'm just a little guy. Right. And it couldn't be further from the truth. I mean we have very, very, very small companies that get hit. Maybe not a specific DDoS attack, but absolutely ransomware. Because you got to remember they're sending out these, these messages, whether it's malware or emails or whatever, I mean to hundreds of thousand millions of people. And it's just all it takes. And it's almost always an employee that opens something, does something wrong and not maliciously at all. It's just, oh, this is interesting. Let me click on it. And then they'll usually sit in your network for several weeks, months in some cases, and really just try to understand where you're storing things. But size, surprisingly, has very little to do with it. In fact, it's probably more common to see a small business get hit than a large business, if you can believe that, because large businesses typically have the systems in place. It's just like when they say when you see people getting jumped and mugged on the street, they're not actually going after the group of people that are. A big group of people, of Marines that are hanging out down downtown. They're looking for somebody that's, you know, not paying attention. They've maybe got their head down, look like they're an easy target, they can get in and out quick. It's very similar for cyber, for bad actors on the cyber side. They're looking for very simple targets. And if you can put together, string a bunch of those together, yes, the payday is bigger on a whale, but it's way easier to get in and out with some of these smaller targets.

Okay, fair point. We appreciate you. You stopped me in my tracks on that one for sure. Because you're right. No, a lot of these startups start up as small businesses and they need to remember that they're not immune for sure. Lastly, like, projecting forward a little bit because we've been saying for a year now the return to office hybrid, like, it's still unclear, right, what every company is going to do, what's. What's best for them. So custom, like, what are you seeing over the next year, especially on the cloud side, the digital kind of components that companies are choosing to do, especially with this big unknown, I think, hanging over them on their decision for in person versus virtual.

I think what. Jared, you want to go first? You can you tell me?

No, that's okay. Go ahead.

Okay. So I, I think what covet really did the start of, you know, 2020, it really, I think made organizations realize technology is their friend. They really need to adapt and get some things in play. And also the other thing, what it did was made it realize there's no cookie cutter and there's no mold of how I need to run my business. Who said that eight to five folks in the office is the way that it has to be, you know, and we've also seen productivity has skyrocketed with remote workers because you're eliminating windshield time, you're eliminating the water cooler talk, et cetera. Et cetera. There's so many things. I'm seeing a trend, honestly, it's all over the map. Some organizations are going back to work, but maybe for a couple days, which is really kind of a hybrid environment. Some have gone fully remote as well. So I think honestly the trend is customization and that's the exciting thing. You're getting away from kind of the cookie cutter, the mold and this is how things are done. So that's honestly what I'm saying. Every organization is doing something different that fits their actual needs, which is kind of exciting because it's also changing the mindset and just the overall outlook on everything where, hey, let's. I can do things that is customized well. It's going to fit what makes sense for me.

Yeah, yeah. I think the only certainty is nobody knows exactly. Kind of like with, with COVID we had a lot of theories. I think almost all of them turned out to be partially true, partially not. And, and I think that the business environment has been similar. The thing that I've always loved though about the startup environment and startup ecosystem is that they've had this remote work thing figured out for a long time. We work for a large company and this was pretty new. We went from ess, very few people working remote, to almost our entire employee population of 50,000 plus workers being remote in some capacity, which was a significant deal. So, you know, I don't, I don't mean. I think when I think about the startup community, this is something that they're kind of used to, but again, it still doesn't. It still, you know, forces you to think about your network differently, about how you access things differently, and creates a reliance. It's, let's be honest, it's a lot easier to support an IT organization when everybody's in the same building because you can literally walk over and help somebody with their printer. Becomes a lot harder when you can't do that and it becomes harder to secure things. It becomes harder to do a lot of things. But I think that if you plan the right way and you involve the right people and the right partners, I think that the best of both worlds is you create a very secure environment that you're confident in, but you also don't lock everybody out so that it's almost impossible to get in. So it's, it's the right balance of making user access and experience easy at the same time making sure it's secure. And that's, that's really tough to do. It's easy to say it's like make it easier to access things and make it more secure. But I think that's what everybody really, a lot of companies really struggle, even large companies struggle with that. It's easy to make things more secure and it's easy to leave things wide open. But that perfect balance is what's really tough.

Yeah. And something to pull out of what you both said, little keywords from the customer needing a custom solution and having people to help as partners and identify solutions. To be honest, the startup world has a little bit of hubris in that they're like, ah, software can fix it, software can solve everything. And I think we found they can't. There isn't one software to solve all your solutions and needs. It can augment and it can help you. Right. Allow your team to work from anywhere in the world. But you may need someone and experts to weigh in and say let's make it right for you. So I think that's super important that I think people have at least leaned into these days that you know, I'm willing to pay for expertise, not just pay a put a credit card in and the subscription will do its job. Oh, it didn't do its job. Cancel it. Find a new one. Like we don't have time to just trial everyone's software and hope that's the right work for us. So I think that's kind of interesting to think about as well too that we've learned that people matter in solving our tech needs. For sure.

Yeah. And to your point there, it's a great one. You know, I think being a large company like Cox, we could go develop these solutions on our own. We choose not to. In general, we engage the premium suppliers of this technology. VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Cisco, Veeam, Certo. I mean we basically take the best of the best, you know, the top shelf, if you will. And we aggregate that in a way that really is powerful for a customer. So yes, you can go self solve this, you can probably go buy this solution and piece together this solution, but you're not going to have the expertise, you're not going to have the knowledge of doing this hundreds and thousands of times over, taking companies and migrating them into this environment and helping them with the migration, the indoctrination of their user base and then ultimately the end user support. You're not going to have that ability as a startup certainly, but also even as a larger company. And so I think that's what's really neat about what we do is we take these technologies that are already industry Leading. They're already Gartner winners. They're top tier quadrant and we aggregate them in a way that's really meaningful for, for smaller businesses because that's, that's really where, that's where our focus is. We're really focused on the small medium business and, and being local and giving people that powerful set of tools that they can use and, and expand and grow with.

So yeah, and from the team that I've worked with like you both and Todd, you're also very forward thinking and willing to try new tools and be the guinea pig as well. So I know that a lot of your team has tested and tried a lot of sales tools and marketing tools and if it works for your team, you're now one an enterprise brand which is huge for a startup to have. Right. So you get to become a customer as well and then an ambassador and sharing it with all your other companies too. So think of I for my own listeners here, our own listeners here, like think of Cox in terms of being an open sandbox in certain environments as well to try and test things as well too. So thank you guys for always being open to that. Lastly, this is the tacos and tech podcast we I am not going to let you off the hook without knowing your recent taco favorites because both of you have had previous past favorite taco spots. I happen to have had the taco stand for lunch today which is like referred taco places on this podcast. Do you guys have Today is Cinco de Mayo when we're recording this by the way, when this goes live, who knows. But there's a talk every day is taco day. Here on the podcast you guys have some recent new favorite taco places. Jared, you go first.

Well, yeah, so there's, there's several but it's Cinco de Mayo and I happen to be in San Clemente today. So I'm just a little north of of San Diego.

NorCal. Got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Up in North Carolina. Yeah, up in Silicon Valley. Today I, there's a spot and I hesitate to say it because I love it so much, but it's called the SC Ranch Market up here in, in San Clemente and one of my favorite places for al Pastor tacos and if you blink, you'll miss but I love that place. And then man, geez, like I said before, San Diego, I mean I literally just come down there just to eat every meal for tacos. There's a long list of them. I don't, I couldn't even tell you I Think I, I gave. I think I gave you five last time I was on Neil.

Yeah, there's no wrong answer. We'll refresh those for sure. It's so Southern Californian to say, hey, don't move here. Cause it's great. And hey, don't find my taco spot and don't find my surf spot. So, you know, those are the three main that while we want it, we're happy to live here. We'd rather people not find out about and change that. But Tim, how about you favorite spot? Yeah.

So there's a place in Mission Viejo. It's called Albert Tacos. It's right across from Saddleback College. Love that place. They have a whole big variety of things, but they got awesome tacos. So I gotta say, Albert tacos in.

Mission Viejo, Albert, if it's across the street from a college, you can't go wrong because it's, it's got a, it's got constant feedback loop of customers giving them, giving them feedback 24 7. So awesome. Good ones to add to our taco database, which we update weekly. Guys, thanks again for, for dropping some knowledge here on the pod with us. Always appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you, Neil. And thanks for your continued investment into, into this community. It's been awesome working with you for so many years.

Oh, likewise. For sure.

The feeling is, you know, thank you, Neil. And what you do is awesome. I mean, you're making a difference and love working with you and just, just thank you for having me as a guest. It was awesome. I had a good time and good.

To see you at Eureka Fest. Thanks for representing.

Definitely.

Cheers. Thanks for tuning in to the Tacos and Tech podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshbroodtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also, follow Fresh Food tech on all of our social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

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