Latest / Unstuck Pod / Double Down or Lose (Michael Howard, Angie Ocasek and Jamie Schneiderman)
Transcript
- Jamie: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Unstuck Pod. Appreciate you joining today. Really excited to have Michael Howard here from Protegrity. And I'm going to hand it over to Michael to introduce himself, tell you a little bit about his journey in the company, and go from there. So, Michael, welcome. Michael Howard: Jamie, that's some introduction there to help me out. ⁓ I have to self bootstrap, jumpstart myself. I got back from a general kickoff for the company, and I'm kind of reeling from the participation, which included inebriation deep thought on AI. But my journey here today is an eclectic one. Jamie: Ha ha! Michael Howard: that I'm kind of like a second generation Silicon Valley guy. And I consider first generation people like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and all legends we know about. ⁓ I'm what's called generation. But as such, I got to meet many of these people and learn from them. And so my journey starts from those people in Berkeley. Whether it be at Oracle or working at EMC or dealing with Apple, a whole bunch of places ⁓ covering such topics as databases, AI and ⁓ ⁓ And I'm back one of my points in my career, which is called ⁓ data security or AI And that's what Pritegrity is all about. Like I was saying earlier to you that we're all on this AI transformational boat and we're all learning together and it's a very exciting times and a very profound set of times today. Jamie: So can you, fascinating when you also go back to Silicon Valley and when we look at what transformation is and kind of innovations and the things that have come about and what the world looked like, really not that long ago, call it, I say pre-internet, ⁓ even like really not that long ago. So let's talk about AI, because I think a lot of people are, excited, nervous, How do you see that the transformation associated with that compared to some of the other technologies ⁓ that seen come about over the last, ⁓ I even want to pick a timeframe, but just some of the other technologies. Michael Howard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, ⁓ and we could get Angie's perspective on this because she's sort of part of this transformation. I've been in the AI world since the late 90s. So that's why it's been a long thing for me. And how did I get involved with AI? At Oracle, I led the acquisition of a company called Thinking Machines for Oracle, which was one of the first MPP out ⁓ configurations to support trees, nets, neural nets at a vast scale. And at that point, a vast scale was maybe a couple of terabytes, Nothing compared to today. And when I think about when I was leading that I was so excited. to bring a new formula to the Oracle world. And I remember Larry Ellison in the elevator with me actually shaking my hand, which was a very different experience than all the meetings I typically had with him where he would point out, eviscerate, would say, eviscerate any or personal failing. So that was, ⁓ stands in the elevator. But. Jamie: Yeah Michael Howard: Whereas today, if I were to juxtapose that feeling to today's feeling, and maybe Angie could speak for herself, every time I do an interview with someone, say for a sales job or a marketing job or even an engineering job, everybody fearful of the future. No one knows what's going to happen. And The people in the AI companies who are bubble wrapped and secured by the RSUs and options that they have therein, think are extremely disconnected to the discontent and the worries that ⁓ all have. I don't know, Angie, you want to speak for yourself on that one? Angie Ocasek: Well, for sure. I mean, my perspective as a millennial straddling the world of analog to internet to all the dystopian future in pop culture related to AI. It isn't a surprise that it's met with fear and trepidation, but then as someone who has to adapt, course, the initial reaction is fear. Because what does that mean? What does that mean for my value within an organization? Am I going to be replaced? You see those reports that come in about X amount of employees and the software industry is being hit the hardest in terms of job loss because AI is taking those. So yeah, the first thought is, well, what is my survival? What is the path to survival look like? What do I have to do? So if a company that I'm in is more about empowering me or enabling me to take on just like new skill sets because of AI and not for the mindset of like adapter, you gonna get replaced, then it's a little bit different, right? Jamie: I think it's, you know, I've never, it's interesting. Interestingly, I've worked in software for a long time. I work with a ton of companies that are in the AI space and I've never seen so much confusion and uncertainty just about what is it, what is it going to be? What's it going to mean? I thought, And so, you know, I would echo the statements. It's very interesting to see what that is. No one seems to know. It's very, it's off putting from that perspective. I do want it to do want to go back. I did tell you that I looked at one of, in particular, one of the blog articles that you had written. and I, and I liked the idea of is another extinction event, right? It was the, it was sort of like, if I was going to take something away from it, it was when you, sort of did it in the. long longitudinal view of what is this and how many times have we been here before? And I'm still trying to like, I just wanna make sure that I love to give you your thoughts around, I love to hear your thoughts, Michael, about is this, ⁓ this different? What do you think? Michael Howard: I think it is different the extinctions have been ones. And this one about who you are and what you bring to the world. In other words, it's ⁓ an event that deeply into what we hope to become is experts in something, whether it be in writing, whether it be in coding, whether it be in marketing, whether it be in articulation, context there. And ⁓ of other extinction events, ⁓ it was real estate or mortgages or... different paradigms in computing. was always ⁓ mechanical replacement ⁓ the former, not an obliteration of, say, the notion of expertise and talent. So thinking is that the New World Order has to think very differently about how to secure oneself in the future. I have one concept that I call knowledge arbitrage. And I that the culture is going to have to change in terms of how to have compete. with a... literally with models. Right? now, for someone like me, when I compare, and this is an odd statement, right? When I compare myself to the thinking ⁓ a language model, small or large, there's no competition still. And I can say that with either chutzpah or hubris. Jamie: interesting. Michael Howard: or some degree of empirical facts. that's because of the vast experience that I, as OG of Silicon Valley have. But when I think of people who are just joining the fray, Angie, who is in the beginning of her career. It's a different story. Jamie: So, so I, I here, let me, let me take that to, you know, you've, you've just came back from, well, inebriated and other things in Mexico. So, ⁓ but I, but I do, ⁓ do want to talk. So, so here you are talking about transformation, taking the company. So, so I, cause I, ⁓ cause we can get, ⁓ we go way out there and believe me, it's. Michael Howard: Yeah. ⁓ Jamie: I'm comfortable actually doing that. actually enjoy it. for the sake of how to think about it in a practical sense, here you are in front of the company. You've got people working for you. How, how, do these conversations manifest? Yeah. What do you do? How, what does that look like? Michael Howard: Yeah, wave out there. What do do? Yeah. Yeah. And there's some good news there, rather than being dystopian, as Angie put it. In order to, you have to have your folks be motivated about what they're doing and where they're going. Right? you, you, ⁓ with this pressure, this compression that is happening, have to devise ways to, be more knowledgeable, be more competitive, be more curious, be more motivated. And the only way to do that is to break the walls, the, the, the walls of this new religion. Right? Just obliterate them. OK, ⁓ them have peace with ⁓ the we endeavored, built a really incredible educational in the company for people to become bilingual, for lack of a better word, to be bilingual in normal state of things and to be bilingual in the AI state of things, right? that bilingualism is really, I think, helping people grasp this transformational challenge that's going on. Angie, I you were part of that, right? Angie Ocasek: Yes, yep. And I think that it's so important to expose people, in a non-technical world as I am in marketing, there is a little bit of a distance between the technology and even just the whole world of, know, what are the engineers doing or what does it mean to vibe code? Those things, again, initially scary, but when you want your company as an, you know, me being part of it, to be part of the story and not just kind of on the sidelines promoting it somewhere to actually have some ownership of it. There was this whole initiative to get us a get smart initiative on AI. So we put on AI labs, we spent a week ⁓ going ⁓ building own models and everything and understanding like where does it fail? Where does it break? Is it going to be perfect? These are all really interesting things to me and also going back to that word empowering, it really was because it's like, ⁓ look at me, marketer actually going in and ⁓ ⁓ really interesting to see that number one is not, this is not just like an exercise or a thing to do, but it's something that actually matters, right? It matters in large scale and then not just accessible to but to all the customers that need it. Jamie: Angie, back to that point, ⁓ you ended off also, I want to talk about, Michael said, AI safety, right? So data AI safety or security, right? Security, excuse me. ⁓ But I'll the two together. And you say matters. ⁓ You learn stuff. see it. You're marketing. And it's valuable to a customer. Angie Ocasek: You Jamie: Help me, like, do you know now ⁓ you didn't know before ⁓ helps you think differently about what you guys are doing with your clients and where that goes? Angie Ocasek: At a very micro level, minor tweaks to the things that you input will have a large impact. What the model knows can be wrong and that can result in a very big sorry moment, in which case ⁓ safety is so important. Because if you are sorry and you make a mistake and you'd have ⁓ rework is such a large, it a big deal. It's a reputational, you know, cost. It's a ⁓ time cost. a financial cost. You know, ⁓ through this whole exercise of ⁓ trying to understand the business value of what integrity does and what value do we deliver to the world. ⁓ it wasn't until this whole AI ⁓ initiative that I fully understood, okay, maybe right now we aren't in that space where we can fully put number, measurable numbers into what we're doing and why it's important, but. ⁓ We have customers that are doing these large-scale things. have an airline customer who service or it's a platform that Services all these different airlines and we all fly. So the impact is great for Anyone who flies if there's a mistake that impacts your travel your personal information the workflows that are you know, ⁓ do I call it like chain of custody or anything like that these are all things that impact individual people and not just Michael Howard: Thank Angie Ocasek: you know, money or not just, ⁓ this company wants to, and let's be real, AI is not a product, right? It's not the value of the AI initiative to a customer, to a company is like, so I can do more automated things. It's so I can solve customers problems. And if you aren't protecting that, and you make one little mistake, that could be huge. And so I know I ⁓ rambled about that, but it ⁓ became to me in that sense. Michael Howard: Thank you. I mean. I mean, it's so heartening to me to hear Angie speak like that because probably two weeks ago she couldn't speak like that. You know, so that's how fast things are going and the cultural attributes of a company or a household, right? I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's a professional organization or a personal organization at this point, There is a new relationship with the New World Order that has to be attained. Jamie: So for you guys, ⁓ in space, and you're talking about ⁓ the of security. And Angie's example was around if you make a mistake as a client, ⁓ using AI, real problem. So. So to me, you think about it in the context of we got it wrong? Or you think about in the context of what if the information we have gets out? Or do we control things? ⁓ do you think about this? Because it feels like as soon as you open the door to AI, the multiply so significantly that ⁓ the can multiply with it as well. Michael Howard: Yeah, and that's a profound statement there in that the multiplier effect almost infinite. so you just go back a couple of weeks with mythios, you have essentially a security, a security alert in terms of software security, a security alert in terms of the world order, right? mean, we say about the White House, even they're alarmed, the Defense Department is alarmed. You have the bad guys in China, Russia, North Korea now just salivating because they can use these fantastically powerful models to attack every which way. create ⁓ confusion on what to do. Every CFO, right? Every CFO today is told either by the board of the company or their that they have to become more efficient, ⁓ and way you become more efficient is through AI. And yet, you have this conundrum here where You have things like memorization, gradient leakage. You have a prompt injection, data poisoning. it's unbelievable. So, protegrity is in an amazing position because its existential definition to protect data, protect knowledge, protect information. Right. And we do it a very fundamental way such that even with the power coming from Claude, cannot, cannot overwhelm. I'm going to, I'm going to say like the watermark that we build into data. It's impervious to those attacks. the security model of yesteryear where you have giant companies like Cisco Juniper or what have you, where they're always worried about some kind of like the defense of the, what is it? What did Harry Potter, know, the defense of the dark arts, right? Was around the perimeter of Hogwarts, right? Well, what? You gotta get inside the walls now. and protect it from there because world order has changed. It's now you have to protect your recipe for a given, I don't know, like wizard, what you call it? I don't even know all the ones in Harry Potter. ⁓ You what I mean? But you got to protect your recipes, your own wizard ⁓ recipes, Angie Ocasek: ⁓ Yeah. Jamie: So let me ask, want to, so clearly, ⁓ you said, you're in a, it's a unique opportunity and a unique time and you're super well positioned, but let me talk positioned for a second because the world is changing so fast. People say I have to use AI. They don't know what they don't know about the risks because they change literally, as you've said, like, Michael Howard: unique opportunity. Jamie: Here we are only a few in the last few weeks. It's changed dramatically. How hard is it to build a company when you're talking and you're trying to describe what you do and how you change things and where you are when the world that you're the entire foundation upon which that is built is shifting daily. Michael Howard: Yeah. Jamie, excellent point. When I Pritegrity, I thought I would have somewhere in the of an 18-month window to get the company to a point where I felt comfortable with it in terms of the capabilities needed for this onslaught that AI has. And when Claude or Anthropic announced its ability to parse code and find vulnerabilities, let's ⁓ 100x, 1,000x than existing ⁓ man-based or methods. And even though it didn't have any direct impact to protegority, The hammer came down and I realized there's no more 18 months. And the velocity of change now is not, let's say, every six months. I mean, you could almost call it a weekly cadence at this point. ⁓ software, have notions of sprints ⁓ things like ⁓ agile programming. That has been upended because of velocity of change. And of course, this seeps into how you manage people, the job descriptions that you have, how you even think of whether or not a particular employee is doing well or not, right? Because this whole context has changed. the first thing that you have to do is you You start small, think big. You first get a small group, coterie group of people in the company who can be the linchpin for everyone else to leverage. So months ago, I created an AI tiger team in the company, 15, 20 people, something like that, real small and just, and inundated them with every possible angle. rather than going after the whole company, start small, think big. Then that started the AI labs that Angie was referring to. And so they started wanting to kind of show their strength. And once you have a group of people that are in the know, then change of the velocity that I've just mentioned becomes a little less onerous. because your ability to assimilate now has been strengthened and accelerated. And so the fear of change almost like you're part of that ethos rather than against the grain. Angie Ocasek: I mean, these people, some of the people in the Tiger team, they're my peers and that did make it more relatable and accessible. It wasn't just a group of people who were already in the know. Jamie: So. Michael Howard: It's a very interesting cultural thing, right? ⁓ it just, you know, where you ⁓ everybody would, before everyone had a swim lane. Angie marketing swim lane didn't need to know about fine tuning or prompting a model. Now they do. Jamie: Yeah, it's cultural, right? No, and you're essentially, what's fascinating is it's a, you, you, what I heard, what I hear from you is, sure, there's a lot of things that have to happen, but the first thing that you tackle was it's cultural change to, to, to around change, right? So it's how do we, how do we increase the pace of change and the approach to change so dramatically because the world around us is changing so fast and a way that we can't possibly anticipate. So we've got to adapt completely. So again, putting process in place, ⁓ helpful. Changing culture, helpful, and then that can then ⁓ itself ⁓ process. Michael Howard: Yeah, right. Change has to be embraced and enjoyed to some degree, right? I feel, as a CEO, I'll be honest with you, I never really cared that much about that. Everyone talks about culture, let's have great culture, and everyone's happy, and everyone's productive. ⁓ Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. I love that. Michael Howard: When it came down to it, came down to whether or not a company was successful or not. The culture was, are you making money or not making money? ⁓ everything in between is kind of like irrelevant. Here AI has forced a different mentality on culture. You can't just think about making money first. Angie Ocasek: you you Michael Howard: You got to put your talent first. a negative side to this is if, like, say Angie or someone like her said, ⁓ gave AI labs the Heisman, right? Said, or ⁓ let's in a perfunctory way, went into and ⁓ it's embraced. You know, the negative side of this is that you are going to, what is it called, separate the wheat from the chaff. It's going to happen. Jamie: Yeah. But yeah, mean, listen, but that's a choice, right? That's quite Darwinian, right? That's a Darwinian, right? Like is survival of the fittest, right? If you want choose to not go there and learn and adapt and evolve your toast, right? And I think that's a very relevant, good way to think about it. Listen, for me, this has been awesome. I love this. ⁓ And could go on and on and on. Michael Howard: That's their choice. That's their. It's a Darwinian. ⁓ Jamie: It's a matter of how much patience and attention span the folks are who who listen but Michael I would love for you if you wouldn't mind just if you could give advice to others out there Who running companies who are building? You know the next the next ⁓ hopefully the big Companies that could been in Silicon Valley, but are could be anywhere now. What advice would you give would you pass on? Michael Howard: advice would I pass on? Don't ever become a CEO. That would be the first thing. Jamie: It's a good one. Michael Howard: People believe that being a CEO is a great thing and it's a very complicated job because the geological plates are always changing, whether it be the board, the people, your peers. But that would be one of advice, right? But what ⁓ would say that in this new world order, right, when you're building a company or building up your own so to speak, double down on what you want to do. I mean, just go all in. All in. Going halfway in is not going to do it. there's going to be... what's going to take. You have to go all in. And you can't do that, then try something else. Jamie: Great advice. So listen, this been fantastic. I love it. I want thank Michael, Angie. ⁓ It was great insight. ⁓ Love the And to everybody who was watching, listening, appreciate it. Until next time, thanks. Michael Howard: Well, thank you.