Ron Gula: Bootstrapping Tenable to $100M revenue and becoming an influencer
Download MP3Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.
Ross Haleliuk:I am Ross Haleliuk.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And I am Mahendra Ramsinghani.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:We have spent decades building, investing, and researching cybersecurity companies.
Sid Trivedi:On this podcast, we invite you to join us inside the network, where we bring the best founders, operators, and investors, building the future of cyber.
Ross Haleliuk:We will talk about the hard parts of the founder journey. Launching companies, getting to product market fit, raising capital, and scaling to an exit.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And, yes, we will also be talking about epic failures.
Sid Trivedi:But, Mahendra, we're here to make the founder journey easier.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:That is correct, Sid. But we cannot make it too much easier because startups are hard. And, of course, you already knew that.
Ross Haleliuk:Alright, you too. Enough. Let's get started with this week's episode.
Ross Haleliuk:Welcome, Ron, to inside the network. Before we go into the episode, we just got out of RSA. It was an exciting conference. There were over 50,000 attendees, and it was great to see you there too.
Ross Haleliuk:What were your key learnings? What did you see?
Ron Gula:I think the biggest thing I saw was the excellent use of artificial intelligence. People who were doing AI for security talked about it like that. There was no high level, superfluous marketing there, and I still can call it the RSAI conference because AI is gonna eat the cyber industry. So that was some of my feedback there.
Ross Haleliuk:Yeah. So for me, I haven't really spent all that much time on the floor. In the out in the, you know, minutes, or tens of minutes, I did, go around. The one thing that stood out was, I don't remember which vendor specifically was this. And I genuinely don't remember.
Ross Haleliuk:Not only I do don't want to call them out, but I don't remember the actual vendor. What was interesting to see, there was a company that had, that didn't have a booth, so it had an empty space. And it just had a sign redirecting people to another booth, essentially saying that, hey. This vendor was acquired by this other big company. Please go to that other big company and talk to them.
Ross Haleliuk:To me, that was that was the most insane marketing decision, insane marketing choice. You essentially had like, it doesn't matter who you are as a vendor. What matters is that you got a space which you can fill however you want, and that is how you decided to go about it. So to me, that that was the most insane part. The most interesting and the most unexpected was probably the fact that there were quite a few, well, there were few, there were not enough companies tackling AI for security or security for AI, but specifically AI for security.
Ross Haleliuk:I believe it was only Protect AI and maybe 1 or 2 other vendors that were in that space, and everybody else did not really have a large presence or any presence at the floor. That was that was surprising, and then there was also probably 1 or 2 vendors in the AI SOC space or, you know, AI engineer, for a SOC, and the rest are still probably in stealth. So that was surprising and unexpected.
Sid Trivedi:For me, I think the most surprising thing was just seeing Keanu Reeves in an actual marketing commercial for a cybersecurity company. Right? That it was just it was it was unexpected. You know, we've seen over the years, we've had a whole bunch of high quality athletes, actors, you know, titans of industry go and promote cybersecurity, but that it was it was very unexpected. In terms of, what I didn't expect, I think the number of nations that had not just boots, but a large presence, whether that's the United States.
Sid Trivedi:I mean, the secretary of state Tony Blinken came and did a keynote, which was amazing just given the fact that just days before he was in Israel trying to negotiate a ceasefire. And then he ended up going to Ukraine right after this. So he ended up spending his Monday coming in doing a keynote at RSA, a cybersecurity conference in the middle of 2 very, very large conflicts that are happening globally. I think it gave us a sense of how much, not just the United States, but you also had presence from Germany, presence from, you know, Israel and other countries who who are physically there in the expo halls but also in sessions. Just how much different nations care about cybersecurity.
Sid Trivedi:We got to see it in full force. That was that was different. Mahendra?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:No, that's a very interesting point, Sid, about how the role of government is becoming more and more front and center, not just in Washington DC where policy papers are being churned out, but actually being a part of the floor, being a part of the conference, coming and speaking at these events. And so, I couldn't agree more that the role of government is becoming more and more amplified. You know, for me, the parts that were interesting, to Ross's point, the company is getting acquired where a booth is empty. I spoke with several VCs who were talking about companies getting offers. So one company that is about 5 to 6 million in revenues has a $800 million offer at the table, acquisition offer.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And I was asking the CEO, Hallelujah, why did you take it? And the CEO says, Well, because I have a VC giving me $200 million at a $1 billion valuation. So as much as all the doom and gloom that we hear about companies sort of, you know, not being able to raise money, here are some outliers that I heard.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Another interesting data point I I heard was I talked to a bunch of CISOs asking their views on AI. And consistently, most of the CISOs said 99.9% of whatever this AI snake oil is bullshit, literally. And so, so I just sort of like say, hey, wait a sec, but those are my companies. Those are investors who are all excited about AI. And this user would be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, your excitement becomes my prop.
Sid Trivedi:Too much too much fun.
Sid Trivedi:Well, Ron, let's go a little bit into kind of a few different parts of your life, and we're gonna start with a little bit of information on what you were doing before Tenable. Of course, we'll talk about the Tenable story and all the learnings you have had. We'll talk a little bit about after Tenable, both in terms of your investing career, which is now quite long, as well as a little bit about what you're doing to try to influence the industry, both through your foundation work and and other work you've done. But let's start with your background and your childhood.
Sid Trivedi:Tell us a little bit about Ron before Tenable. Everyone talks about Ron, you know, this very famous founder of Tenable and CEO for 15 years, but very few folks have really understood your background and where you came from.
Ron Gula:I appreciate the opportunity to share that because I think everybody in cybersecurity should think about what they're doing as equal importance as we try to professionalize our industry. But I was fortunate enough to grow up. My mom and dad lived up in Syracuse, New York, grew up in upstate New York, went to Clarkson University. 1 of my roommates was, Marty Roesch, the guy that that did Sourcefire. Right?
Ron Gula:So we were good friends back in the day, and and, he's doing his own thing at Netography now. But from Clarkson, I joined the Air Force. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I actually got into fighter pilot flight school. There's a flight school where you can go to instead of having to be the 1st in your class to get an f 16 or an f 22.
Ron Gula:You would have to be anybody in this class and you can get something. But it turns out I pulled a little bit of g's and it didn't really work out too well for me. So I got out of that and got into my first love, which was always computers. And from there, I end up working on a tour at the National Security Agency where I was doing penetration testing in the nineties. And nobody called it Cyberback then.
Ron Gula:It was information operations, CNO, CNA, computer network defense, all that kind of good stuff. But I got to be involved with some national exercises, something called eligible receiver, which you can Google and find a few things, but was kind of a cool test that was was interesting. I was involved with that a good bit, and, the planning side. And, I got out, worked for a, it's a bad term, but a Beltway contractor, BBN. You know, the people who invented the Internet, I got to meet the guy that did the at sign and and stuff like that.
Ron Gula:Got to learn how to do government procurement. But from there, I really started working at startups. I joined a company called US Inter Networking, was sort of like a cloud one o company. And they were doing things like buying PeopleSoft and exchange licenses and selling them to multiple customers. Nobody heard of SaaS back in the day.
Ron Gula:So I got to understand new licensing and selling new licensing with new models and whatnot. But while I was there, I was running intrusion detection, so called risk mitigation. I wasn't the CISO. I was the guy doing the pen testing and keeping hackers out. And, I had the idea to to write Dragon.
Ron Gula:And I came home one day, talked to my wife, Cyndi, and said, I I need you to figure out the the business side of things. I'm gonna figure out how to write a product and sell it. And within 18 months, we had sold that product for, just couple double digits. We had massive deployments to DOD, Citibank, AOL, that kind of stuff. And, the people that bought us were from Interisys, Jack Hufford, And we ended up going on to start a 10able network security.
Ron Gula:So that's a fun story. I love telling it. And, you know, everything we did was kind of building upon what we did in the past. And I'm just trying to give back now.
Ross Haleliuk:Very interesting. Ron, you started doing information security well before it was called cyber. And it's interesting to me, what was security like at that time? How many people worked in the industry? What was the industry like?
Ross Haleliuk:Where did you meet others? Did you indeed congregate as a community, or was it still all very, disconnected?
Ron Gula:So there was a lot of interesting overlap. So, you know, working at the NSA, working as a pen tester, the world went through a number of changes. Right? We used to hoard exploits. So if you were on the scene in the nineties, you know, 0 days, you would trade them.
Ron Gula:And I still remember trading 0 days with various people, and then something changed in the late nineties, early 2000. All of a sudden, it became the cool thing to publish and get credit for that. So that was a really big deal. There was always collaboration. Like, I mean, Gene Spafford, Matt Bishop, a lot of these gray beards, they would come by, you know, the NSA.
Ron Gula:We'd see these people, you know, at RSA. We we would talk to them, and there's a lot of collaboration there. But cyber wasn't really cyber until people's websites started getting hacked and people started, you know, stealing money from banks and and that sort of thing, and then the whole industry just kind of kind of exploded. And if you didn't kinda grow up in the industry, it's people on the outside who it's become so insular that if you didn't grow up in the industry, it's really hard to get into the industry. I'm sure we'll talk about that a good bit.
Ron Gula:Because we speak so many different languages, and then we have so many things that we do in cyber that just turn non cyber people off, whether it's the language of talking about hunting the Russians or the Chinese on the network. Right? Which can be a little too overly militaristic and maybe turn off, you know, certain parts of the demographic and stuff, or just the the jargon that we do. It's it's not very inviting to, to people who want to make decisions about important things about where their data is going. So so that's the biggest things I've seen change over the last probably 15, 20 years is just the popularity of cybersecurity and the continued lack of understanding of what it does because the technology just changes so fast.
Sid Trivedi:And just, you know, following up on that, Ron, this question that Ross asked about how the cyber community was so early when you got started, did you think that you wanted to go into cyber? Was cyber even a a category that you define? You talked about your Air Force days. I've read that you wanted to be a pilot, and and that would have been kind of partly your dream. So how did you kind of fall into to cyber?
Ron Gula:Yeah. I I think I'm gonna coin something new. I I don't think I've said on other other shows, which is not only my failed fighter pilot, but but the basic plan was to to go to fighter pilot school and get involved with, like, the UFO program. And, so when I started working at the NSA, people were like, oh, are you working with with the UFOs? Like, no.
Ron Gula:I'm not working with that. Of of course, you are. Right? So so that that you know, I really wanted to do that sort of stuff. And one of the reasons that got me into cyber is I was reading, you know, the online UFO stories, that sort of thing.
Ron Gula:And, I'm not gonna say I was reading them on YouTube that was more like a bulletin board. You had to get with a modem or something like that right back in the day. But right next to those UFO stories was frack. Right next to that, was a ATLGM. So I was able to to go from that to, oh, there's a lot of really, really good things to teach yourself about that.
Ron Gula:So that's that's how I kinda got got into it. I think a lot of people back in the day got into it because it was this sort of edgy, are you a hacker? Are you an information security researcher? Regardless, you had to spend a lot of time teaching yourself about how how does SNMP work? How does Ethernet work? How does how does, you know, these various protocols work?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:You know, one of the refreshing parts about you, Ron, is how you and Cyndi together have played this role in cybersecurity. The 2 of you are both investing, doing good work at the foundation. Even at RSA, you're sort of such a well integrated couple, both in your personal lives as well as your work lives. In cybersecurity, we rarely see this. In fact, the only other person I can think of is Caleb Sima.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:You know, he invited his mom to a talk he gave on AI. And, you know, the audience just loved it that he had brought his mom. And I saw his pictures, he brought his kids to RSA. So share with us how we as human beings and individuals can learn from some of the things you're doing here.
Ron Gula:So it's it's interesting. I didn't set out to do, this is the 3rd company I've done with Cyndi now. And it's not everybody comes out to us and says, oh my gosh, it's so good, so unique. And and it's, it's so nice to see, you know, a loving couple out there do do work. But the reality is you can work I I just we were just speaking at a military conference called HammerCon.
Ron Gula:And we said, look. This is something you can't do. Like, you cannot command an aircraft carrier, and your spouse cannot be in charge of the, f 18 squatter. Right? It's just it's just not something.
Ron Gula:Can't do that in government. A lot of big corporations, you can't do that. But but if you start your own company, you can do whatever you want. And it really, really worked out that, when you take a risk to start a company, you know, your spouse is taking that risk too. And I think I think sometimes people start companies, and maybe the other spouse is working and it gives you this kind of a a cushion and there's nothing wrong with that.
Ron Gula:But at the time, Cyndi and I were were both sort of thinking, hey, let's go all in on this and work on it together. And it it worked out. Then maybe there's another universe where it didn't work out, but but it worked out in this universe. And not only do we do it once, but we did it again with Tenable. And in that story, you know, Cyndi was very gracious, very much backroom, not front and center.
Ron Gula:And you because again, we got a little bit of negative connotations with the husband wife sort of, mom and pop shop would be the the negative term there. But now with Gula Tech Adventures, we speak together a lot. She's keynoted on her own. She's on the boards of companies, you know, and and we work on a lot of stuff at Google Tech Adventures as a team. So that's, you know, some very excited about that.
Ron Gula:And, you know, not just for, you know, trying to represent a nice good marriage and and how to do teamwork and stuff. But it really helps us when we talk to other companies, even if the founders aren't married. Right? Or just maybe it's a father and son. Right?
Ron Gula:Or maybe just 2 people from college. You have to answer questions like how do you make decisions? How do you resolve conflict? What are your goals? And, work on those communications.
Ron Gula:So that's really like the messages that we have to say is like, it just really refined. What are your goals? How do you communicate? And what are the risks that you're taking?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And you know, the most important part here, Ron, is that when Cyndi steps up you know, at RSA, we don't see this balance of gender, balance of diversity. So we're very, very grateful that both of you do this together. It also gives opportunity to a lot of other female founders, and more importantly, female CISOs, who sometimes feel like they may not necessarily have a voice in the room or they may feel not as empowered. So thank you. I know Cyndi is not with us today, but please extend our gratitude to her.
Ron Gula:I will. I will. And we do get that. It's funny because we do get the opportunity to speak on a lot of different things. We've done a lot of different donations through our our foundation, a lot of different competitions.
Ron Gula:And we're not experts in the things that we've tried to support even though we know that they're there. So one of the ones we did was benefited, you know, just increasing cyber awareness at the, boardroom level. And, you know, the group that won it ended up getting, almost a 1000 women trained in the, qualified technical expert is the standard. I was pretty excited about that because that really increases diversity, really increases not just diversity of of the sexes and and and so but actual diversity of thought. And and that's really where I think the nation really benefits.
Ron Gula:Like, I like, don't get me wrong. I'm I'm quite happy that we have a diverse group of people and stuff, but I like diversity of thought and approaches so much more. And the comment I usually make about Synchronyze, I think one of the reasons we work well together for both engineers. We're more worried about having the correct solution than being perceived as having the right solution. So it's it's pretty good.
Ron Gula:And I think one of the things that stories out there, if you ever watch Ozarks, you know, the lead character, he'll it'll be a very stressful situation, and somebody will say something. He'll be like, that's not helpful. That's very much how how we look things like, what is helpful, what gets us the right things, and how do you communicate about that?
Ross Haleliuk:Interesting. One of the things you've just mentioned, was about the risks of starting companies. And I'm very curious because today, it feels as if the whole idea of entrepreneurship has, to a certain degree, been derisked. Right? There has been a lot of education around starting companies.
Ross Haleliuk:There is a fairly mature venture and investor ecosystem. What was it like when you were starting your first business?
Ron Gula:So it's interesting. You know, coming out of the NSA, coming out of the air force, you don't really get a whole lot of here's how to transition to civilian. Here's how to transition to start a company. Nowadays, you do. The the military has great programs on transitioning, you know, veterans in the private sector and and on but back in the day, it was very much, oh, go go work at a Beltway band.
Ron Gula:It get picked up by by somebody there. You'll have a you'll have a good career. You're an engineer, that kind of thing. There wasn't anybody tapping on your shoulder that says, look. If you got a couple ideas, you can get some coders and and start a company.
Ron Gula:So literally, I I would go to some economic development, some it was basically meetings with businesses, and I'm sitting next to people who have, like, cupcake shops. Right? And I'm good. They're working hard. They're working just as hard as we are, but it's a different set of stuff when you're doing cyber.
Ron Gula:So what we did in the late nineties, early 2000, we kinda did on our own. Right? We never really talked to venture capital people. We never really had what I would consider professional go to market training. We never really had any of that stuff.
Ron Gula:And, we did quite well. And people are astounded that we, you know, brought a company to market and sold it to the federal government, sold it to the intelligence community, sold it to major banks, and got acquired. We have multiple offers for what we did. So now when we do investing, like, one of my biggest questions is, like, what's your risk here? Like, why you don't need to raise money to, like, build a nuclear reactor.
Ron Gula:Right? You you need to sell some stuff. Usually, the founders selling stuff. And I guess we have a lot more higher expectations of startup companies. And we're also very, very aware that when you start a company, one of the biggest risks if you're successful is somebody like come along and make you an offer that you will take.
Ron Gula:Right? Well, you're you're 18 months into it, and here comes Cisco and they buy you. That that happens quite a quite a bit. So we understand that founder's journey a whole lot, but at the same time, we just we know a lot of founders. It just the the team didn't work and, you know, a lot of businesses don't make it past that 1st year or 2 years, or they they get into that zombie state where they're making services and it's business, but it's not a product business, that sort of stuff.
Sid Trivedi:Well, we bounced around the idea of Tenable a few times already. So let's go into it in a little bit more detail. In late 2002, you get started with this new company, and that company in the early days is focused on vulnerability assessment and management and ends up going and creating this new category, which is called cyber exposure management today. But in those very formative years, how did you pick Jack Hufford and Renaud Deraison to work together to go and start Tenable? And how were you even dividing up responsibilities?
Sid Trivedi:Was it that you were CEO and somebody was CTO and someone was CPO? Or were you kind of working together? How did you make that decision?
Ron Gula:Yeah. I I love telling the story because everybody really needs a great set of founders and a great team. And, you know, the way I talk about it is I had I had Cyndi, I had Jack, I had Renaud. They all worked extremely well together, and and it was a really interesting story. Right?
Ron Gula:So Jack knew Cyndi and I. He had done the diligence on acquiring network security wizards for for Interisys. So he knew how well Cyndi ran the books, ran the operations, ran the board meetings, ran all that kind of stuff. And of all the companies they acquired, they said ours was the easiest, not because we were the the smallest, but it was the most well organized. It just kind of made sense, engineers running all that that kind of stuff.
Ron Gula:So Cyndi and Jack really did a lot of the initial, how does the company work? How do we do payroll? How do we get an office? How do we do all that that kind of stuff? Renault and I did a lot of the original coding.
Ron Gula:I had the CTO. I was probably one of the few founders, had the CEO and CTO style. Renault is very public right now, but in their early days, Renault was not as public. So I would introduce myself as CEO, CTO. And it's actually something I'll I'll criticize myself for because I actually will call that out.
Ron Gula:And, you know, if you're a founder and you're the CEO, great. If you're technical, that's that's great too. But but I got lucky. I mean, every one of those people smarter than I am in their areas, and I can speak their language. So I could still p speak code, speak architecture.
Ron Gula:The thing that I think I brought to Renault and and Jack and Cyndi was having been a pen tester, having been, you know, an operator, I can put myself in the operator shoes, and I'm speaking the customer's language, everybody else's way. But the reality is disagreements. But we really agreed on a lot of things. I mean, and we went 15 years or so became super, super successful, we really, really worked well together. And, you know, I definitely miss working with those folks every day, but the culture that we put together is really kinda I think a meet your end is doing a great, great job.
Ron Gula:But a lot of times when I hear people who are working at Tenable, first thing they say is, love working here. Love that culture. It's very enduring. That's kind of that gestation. Oh, there's one other story.
Ron Gula:You never know how you're gonna do it. But when I was doing Dragon, we had worked with Renault on taking Ness's vulnerability scans and mapping them to attacks. Because one of the things you would do with network intrusion detection is you could see an attack going to a Linux computer, But if that computer, in fact, was a Windows computer, maybe you could ignore that attack. So having done that type of correlation with Renault, we were like, we knew about Nessus. We knew we knew Renault.
Ron Gula:We we thought it'd be really, really good to, to have that as part of the Tenable platform.
Sid Trivedi:You talked a little bit about dividing up responsibilities. I'm curious while you can work together as a team when you have so many folks in those formative years, who made the executive decision when there were these arguments between yourself, Jack, Renault, and Cyndi, who was the person who would say, well, this is the way we're gonna go after a debate?
Ron Gula:Well, I mean, I was I was CEO, so I got to make a lot of those decisions, but it wasn't like my way or the highway every day. You don't go 16 years making a unilateral decision, you know, all the time like that. So I wouldn't I've just I almost feel a little uncomfortable talking about it like that. But at least we talked about it quite a bit. Right?
Ron Gula:And there were a lot of things that when you really start to like, I'll give you a good example. When we do like, okay, we're going to change the internal framework architecture of Nessus. Great. Are we going to suffer some customer features, maybe for a quarter or 2, but we're going to then do it. So like, so Cyndi and Jack would have a tremendous amount of of trust of, like, Renaud and I when we made something like that.
Ron Gula:Another thing that we did is we switched today in 2024. I mean, everybody sells things. Everything's ARR. Everything's SaaS. Right?
Ron Gula:But back in the the late nineties, you sold thing perpetual, and you sold a separate maintenance discussion. Right? Well, flipping from that to SaaS was tough. And Bruno, believe it or not, had a lot of empathy for the customers. And, you know, sometimes it was much more on the side of, oh, no.
Ron Gula:We can't, you know, we can't let the customer down and and that sort of thing. And then there's you know? So the it's it's a really interesting, you know, discussion at that point. But I'll just tell you that the discussions we had were very healthy, very well respectful, and it was it was good. Now the hard part though was when Cyndi and I were on different pages.
Ron Gula:Right? Because when Cundi and I were on different pages, it's sort of like, hey, mom and dad are fighting. Right? And it's like, no. No.
Ron Gula:We're engineers talking about, you know, these situations and and that sort of like and we recognize it does put people in a, an awkward comp you know, an awkward position. But, you know, you don't you don't hide the fact. Right? I mean, it's, voluntary related is how we like to to talk about it.
Ross Haleliuk:Ron, Nexus was originally built as an open source solution for vulnerability scanning. And then in 2005, it became a proprietary software. Since you've just you were just talking about subscriptions, what was the journey of monetizing open source nearly 2 decades ago? Like, how did you navigate it? Like, what was hard about it?
Ron Gula:Yeah. So when when we went through that, that was something that if people said, like, what was something you did well that was really risky? That was something we did really, really well because we were able to communicate the change to people and communicate why we did it and, you know, give people alternatives like the, you know, we basically the fork was out there. Right? So it wasn't like we we were taking it away from people.
Ron Gula:Right? We it it was still out there. But the reality is like, everybody thinks of open source as free and written by a community. Well, today, if I said open source, the vast majority of people will focus on free, and they don't really focus on community. NASA's work was tenable.
Ron Gula:And we literally we had like hundreds of engineers writing code, And it was this is not sustainable. Like, this is not a sustainable, you know, sort of long term thing. So we wanted to change that to make a better product for people because we saw all of these vulnerabilities coming and stuff like that. And also back in the day, we were actually also penalized for open source. We would go into deals where it would be like, if it's a half a $1,000,000 deal and and a bank would be like, you need to buy, like, half $1,000,000 of of indemnification insurance because someday somebody might sue you and then sue us because of, because of your your source code that you're using.
Ron Gula:So so we were we were incentivized by the market to kinda go this way, you know, which is a really interesting thing because nowadays, almost everybody's everybody's SaaS offering has some open source code on the back end, but people don't know it or see it because it's behind a mobile app or behind a web. And, you know, there's plenty of that stuff that stuff floating around out there. But, but, yeah, that was the biggest the the biggest thing I'm proud about with that is that we communicated it really well. We had some really good advisers on how to communicate that and put that out, and it was, no no regrets there at all.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:So, Ron, let's shift gears a little bit into the venture capital side of the journey at Tenable. So, Tenable raised a $50,000,000 Series A a after almost 10 years of operations. 1st, talk to us about what that 10 years was like. You completely bypassed bypassed the classical formula that most founders use, which is, I first need money to build something. And here you are saying, We're going to build it.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And not only build it, we'll keep building it for 10 years. I mean, talk to us about that phase of the journey. How did you do it? What were some internal debates with Cyndi, with Renault, with Jack, all the ups and downs?
Ron Gula:So the stories I like to tell about that time are for founders who are going through the struggle right now. So when we started Tenable, we were fortunate to, you know, come off of an exit within tariffs. We had a little bit of money. We were not couple less zeroes than what we're dealing with, today, so to speak. But we were able to float a payroll check here and there.
Ron Gula:And so when we talk to founders about going it and going through tough times and deferring salary and that sort of thing is it's really because we've we've lived it. And what that allowed us to do is get to a point where Tenable was basically cash flow positive. And and at that time we did that raise, we had $50,000,000 in the bank. So people ask, well, why did you raise? And it was for a couple couple of reasons.
Ron Gula:So so one, you know, you really can't go public with somebody who owns a 100% of the stock. I don't know a 100% of the stock, right? But I had a good bit of it, right? It's a lot more than most founders. Like the employees and the founders of Tenable, we owned that company.
Ron Gula:There were no investor that had like a 3rd or 45%. Right? So we were not diluted at all by by that. But at the same time, that can get you an acquisition, you know, which is good. And again, that's a good goal, not wrong.
Ron Gula:But if you're looking to go bigger, you're not gonna go public with that. Right? So the story then is secondary sales. And this gets really obtuse really quick, but the reality is is all those raises we did benefited the employees and the founders in such a way that they were basically pocketing money, you know, and then going back to work the next day. And we had multiple moments when we did that raise where, like, we pull people into a room, and we had to explain what secondary sales were.
Ron Gula:And also have to say, like, well, you could sell right now and pay off your house or hold it, and maybe, you know, someday there'll be a public offering. Right? That's an awkward and very fun conversation I hope every founder has the ability to do. But then we also had, like, tactical issues. Like, you know, we were just being like, today, it's different.
Ron Gula:But in the early 2000, former NSA founder, lives in Maryland, right next to NSA. I can tell you for a fact that we're doing 45, 40, $50,000,000 of revenue, product revenue. Everybody else from California hears, oh, they're a services government contractor company. Right? So raising $50,000,000 from an excellent, you know, venture capital firm, you know, Accel Partners was a really, really big statement.
Ron Gula:You know, so that was that was where, where we were looking at the time.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:That's very fascinating, Ron. Can you share with us how the initial contact with Accel occurred? And then what was the post investment phase like for the next before Insight stepped in with another $250,000,000
Ron Gula:check? Yeah, so I give Ping Li from Accel, partners all the credit. So Ping would meet with Jack, then he would meet with me and Jack, pretty much at every RSA and every Black Hat. And, you know, every year we doubled where we were last year, you know, and it was just it was just one of those things. We just we were we were machines.
Ron Gula:We just kept doing what we were doing because we every year we thought, oh, maybe this will be the year we get acquired. You know? So we weren't thinking about going long until we started hanging out with Ping. We had a couple other funds that were were talking to us and stuff like that. But, you know, it's for the the client, the the, the employees we had at at Tenable.
Ron Gula:You know, again, coming from sort of the Maryland, Virginia area, you know, it's a different thing. There weren't companies going IPO in the cyber market. We were one of those first things. So it was really good to have, Accel Partners come in. And, you know, Ping and the team there came in and met met the employees.
Ron Gula:You know, we did a lot of that. I mean, you know, they were minority of it, $50,000,000 check, minority investors. That's kind of it. Again, a little uncomfortable for them to flying to the east coast. You know, that was interesting.
Ron Gula:Of course, you know, today, it it this kind of stuff happens all the time. But again, early 2000, mid 2000, it was, it was interesting. So then, you know, as we matured, we really got that pre IPO type of thought. And, we hired, Steve Vince. And Steve Vince, the current CFO of Tenable, a local Howard County where where I'm I'm from today, joined and just completely transformed.
Ron Gula:And, like, I have so much respect for, you know, the team that got us to where that that point. But when Steve came in, professional, you know, CFO, FP and a, all that kind of stuff, and I all of a sudden, I could start seeing 4 years, 5 years into the future. And, you know, with all sorts of models that really allowed us to start thinking about, oh, maybe it'd make a lot of sense to raise a lot more money at that secondary thing and take another bite at that at that apple. And, you know, along the way, we had a couple of m and a offers. Didn't really take them.
Ron Gula:You know, had to make some decisions there. But, I think any company on a run up like that happens. And of course, I stepped away, you know, with the idea that Amit's gonna take it public, and that's exactly what happened.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Well, I think that what you built is quite phenomenal. I just wanted to read some statistics for the benefit of our audience. The company had 20,000 customers at the time you went public. You know, that is a significant number. Now, what is interesting is that the average contract value, or ACV, as we might call it, was $5,000 per customer.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:So that's how you were up almost about $200,000,000 in revenues. Did the VCs fight back on the ACV, saying that this is too small an ACV with a very large number of customers? You know, because at most VCs, you know, we like 6 figure contract values with a smaller number of logos, but here you are with exactly the opposite. Can you share a little more of what happened inside the VC conversations around these numbers?
Ron Gula:So, you know, Tenable today, it's very different as far as what they offer than what the when I was running it. But when we were running it, you know, we basically had had Nessus, which was a vulnerability scanner. And, you know, we we added a lot of value to Nessus, but it was basically a single user type of, of of thing, and it went from an unlimited thing for maybe $1200 a year to maybe a per IP thing for, you know, a couple $1,000 a year and and but it was for a user thing. And then we had security center, which was really the the enterprise offering. And he could buy some things for it, but that was the $250,000, the $100,000 thing.
Ron Gula:You constantly have these 2 buckets of, of of revenue that all had little bit little bit different there. And then, you know, we were a little bit late to the cloud game compared to some of our competitors, but we added Tenable. Io and that's where we've been pushing a lot of the the customers, which is sort of a blend of you can't do as sophisticated of some of the analysis you need to do with Security Center, but it's certainly more sophisticated than Nessus. And, of course, Tenable has done a lot of acquisitions, you know, since then. But but the conversation was always, and this is where I go back to all the venture capital we do today, how do I license the thing that I sell?
Ron Gula:So, I mean, at at some points, you know, we had people using Nessus, and we said, well, maybe if we gave Nessus away for free, we could charge a premium for these, you know, these enterprise, insights and and analysis of the data and that sort of thing. And on on the other hand, you're like, well, maybe if you give the analysis away for free, you could sell more Nessus scanners because more people will will like that. And, you know, I don't think we ever got to an answer because, you know, when I was navigating it, it was there were you know, the GRC people wanted to add Nessus to what they were doing. The there was no sore. There was no, you know, the SIM guys wanted to add scanners to what they were doing.
Ron Gula:Of course, now, you know, you've got people who do just asset discovery, like Axonius and stuff like that. And, you know, I would view that as competition even though one's sorta IT management, one's vulnerability manager. They're they're related, but they're, you know, they're very, very different things. And, of course, I didn't talk at all about the cloud and SaaS and mobile devices and all that kind of stuff. That's one of the reasons the Tenable product line right now is they call it cyber exposure.
Ron Gula:Like a lot of those things don't even have, you know, IP addresses right now because they're ephemeral. They come and go. So that's that's kinda where we're at.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:You correctly said, Ron, that the company is very different today. And, you know, as I was looking at the most recent financial, materials that are posted on the company's website, you know, it has almost, 1700, large customers, large meaning more than 100,000 ACB, And it's gone from, 200,000,000 revenues when it went public to today, it's almost north of 800,000,000. So it has added 600,000,000 to top line in 5 years. Compared to 0 to 15 years, it added 200,000,000 top line. So very different business.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:I mean, how do you, as a leader, see these 2 different phases of growth? You know, one was a phase of gradual sort of incline and the other is a very rapid scaling that, Amit is leading.
Ron Gula:Yeah. So Amit's very good at that. Like, I mean, obviously, when we were doing all these things, he he had a good career at, RSA and Net Witness. He has some good time with the the federal government for for stint as the czar. So he had a lot of exposure to how do we get a technology like this in the hands of a lot of people.
Ron Gula:Right? You gotta partners. Right? You gotta have the sales, so you gotta have the branding, and have all that all that kind of stuff. So they've done an excellent job with us.
Ron Gula:Amit's been at this just as long as we have. When we did Dragon, we were working with him at his first, cyber company called RipTech. So, you know, I had a lot of confidence in him being able to, to do this. But, but for the most part, you know, when when you have a brand that's iconic like that, I mean, you know, while I was there, we were able to get a DOD site license, federal government more or less site license, and, you know, do things like that all across the world. You how do you build up on that?
Ron Gula:Well, you gotta do some acquisitions. You gotta maintain those partnerships, and you gotta you gotta keep doing those those those kind of relationships. So I've been very happy with what they've been able to do. But I'm gonna not pretend like I'm responsible for any of that stuff since I've left. I made the conscious decision to very much not hover and just, you know, be a fan.
Ron Gula:Right? Like, some former founders wanna hang out on the board or Twitter or whatever, and I've really tried not to do that.
Sid Trivedi:Well, talking about not hovering, you know, you kind of have this 14 year reign from 2,002 to summer of 2016 as CEO and cofounder. And then in the summer of 2016, you hand the keys over to Amit, and you become a board chairman. And then you do that for another 6 months. And by December of 2016, you also resigned from the board, if I'm correct, and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. And in January, you and Cyndi go and start this new organization called Gula Tech Adventures.
Sid Trivedi:And the mandate in the early days was to focus on early stage security startups. But could you give us a sense for what was the strategy there? Because it was very different from we've had Dimitri on and Dimitri invest in startups, but he's not doing it through some type of structured vehicle the way that you and Cyndi are doing it. So give us a sense for why you did that.
Ron Gula:So when when we left, you know, we wanted it we wanted to be active in cyber, and you can't be active in cyber and just do policy. You can't be active in cyber and just do philanthropy, and you can't be active in cyber and just do venture. Right? I mean, peep people have careers in all three of those fields, But when you look at, like, the whole nation and some of the complexities that we have to fall, we really purposely called Google Tech Adventures Adventures and not Ventures. And it's funny.
Ron Gula:More than once, I've done an interview where they said, Ron Gool, the founder of, you know, Goolatech Ventures, you know, but it's it's an adventure because we think it's all very, very related. And, we're being very purposeful about trying to balance the you know, all those different kinds of, of work. Now there's a lot lot of ways to slice this. I've talked to a lot of folks who are very philanthropic, and they invest a lot, and you don't even know their names. And they're you know, but they've got they write big checks and and that sort of thing, but they chose to be private.
Ron Gula:Now you had Dmitri on at your last episode. Dimitri's doing Silverado Poly Excel Policy Accelerator, very public about that. He's very private about his direct investments and that sort of thing. He does a lot in cyber and outside of cyber. You know, we've chosen to do certain things.
Ron Gula:My point is there's a lot of ways to go there. We really found this balance. And, there's a great interview from some guy named Ross who basically called us a cyber impact hub, which I thought was awesome. I've used that a couple times for what we're doing. But the reality is we're trying to do a number of things.
Ron Gula:It's just be a resource to people who make policy, people be a resource to people who are inventing this because we don't have enough people to to fight China and Russia. We don't have enough people to protect ourselves from ourselves. Like, we're inventing more stuff that exploits our data and our privacy than I think the Russians and Chinese do to us on any given day. So it's, you know, how do you beat that drum and and create an ecosystem that that is doing that? Of course, we're not doing it alone either.
Ron Gula:We co invest with a lot of great other funds. We do a lot of cyber philanthropy with other great cyber philanthropists. So so there's a you know, we're happy to be sort of doing our part.
Ross Haleliuk:Gula Tech Adventures is indeed a very different, organization, partly because if I'm not mistaken, up until now, you have not officially raised the fund. Correct? It is your own money that you've decided to put to put in towards the investing. What made you choose that path? Like, what made you not go out, just raise a fund, and and play with somebody else's money?
Ron Gula:So we thought about it. We thought about it. You know, we've put a little bit more than a $100,000,000 to work, and some of the money we've we've recycled. So it's probably a slightly bigger bigger number than that. But the reality is when we left Tenable, we were responsible for I think it was 600, 700 people.
Ron Gula:So the first few years of doing this, Cyndi and I didn't wanna hire anybody. We've got a great great team right now. It's small team, but we're gonna try to just use our time and some equity to get things done. And now we've we're at the point we need we need some help. But if I take a dollar from you, Ross, and I invested, I feel like I'm gonna have to give you a report on what I'm doing for that dollar.
Ron Gula:And I didn't wanna do that. Right? I'd rather attract people to invest in the companies that we're working with and have them have the relationship with, with the companies. And and that's also something that's a little untraditional. Like, most people in my position will do something called the special purpose vehicle, where I'll get a percentage of that.
Ron Gula:But now I'm involved in managing that and and whatnot. And I just we just didn't wanna do that. Plus, like, I think a lot of what we have to say is really important, and they should listen to us, but we're not the only voice in the room. So, it's sometimes a family office is gonna have, just as much to say as another venture fund. And I want the founders to be exposed to stuff because, I mean, first thing I realized in this business is a lot of VCs get really lucky.
Ron Gula:Right? And a lot of times the you tell somebody, do x, y, and z. You're gonna do well. It's probably the right advice, but it might not might not happen. Right?
Ron Gula:So it's we're trying to be, you know, part of the ecosystem and and do our part, like I said.
Ross Haleliuk:So Gula Tech Adventures right now has over 50 companies in its portfolio. What have you learned since you've made the first investment? What are you now doing differently? How are you evaluating companies? And if if something has changed, then what what what is it?
Ron Gula:So what's what's interesting is that you can work really hard on a company. First of all, what does that mean? Right? If you're a founder, you're probably like, oh, man. These VCs don't do anything for us.
Ron Gula:Right? But But if you look at the point of view from the VC, maybe you have 10 companies. Okay. So what do you do for those 10 companies during your 5 days of the week? Or you can do one introduction per 10 companies.
Ron Gula:That's actually a lot of work. You got to contact people. Do you really want to meet this company that has a cyber widget that does that? It's a little opportunistic. And so, basically, what I've learned is I've learned sort of 2 things.
Ron Gula:You know, 1, when it comes to pitching companies, we wanna know 5 things. What problem do you solve? How do you solve it? Give me some proof. What's your ask?
Ron Gula:And what's your vision of success? And those five things are hard to answer for 1st time founders. Like, they're embarrassed to say, I wanna go IPO. They're embarrassed to say that if I raise a half a $1,000,000 from you, I'm gonna make a $1,000,000 in revenue next year. They they don't they don't know that.
Ron Gula:Right? But what do they know? What do they wanna say? So we wanna we wanna know those those kind of things. And then the the second thing though is that luck has a lot to do with this industry, timing, lock, and it's not a reflection on the founder though.
Ron Gula:We have a lot of former, military founders, former intelligence community founders who had stellar careers, stellar pitch decks, stellar idea. They go to market falls flat, and they think they're a failure. They're not a failure. Right? I mean, how do you how can you predict the buying behavior of, you know, a 100 CISOs in the federal government, for example, you know, that that that kind of thing.
Ron Gula:So there is a little bit of luck, little bit of humility. And, you know, that's something we just want to impart onto those folks.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:You know, speaking of luck, Ron, and timing, of course, you know, I recall a key management company I had invested. This was key management in the cloud in 2012. So 10 years ago, everybody was so intrigued by the idea. They're like, how can you do this? This is so cool.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Not a single buyer. And to add some salt to that wound, some of the buyers said, this is so cool, but do you really think that I'm gonna hand over my keys to you, your little startup is gonna do this in the cloud. So unfortunately, that company was a loss. We had to shut it down. Another, sort of market timing story is about homomorphic encryption.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:I remember nerding out with this founder and he was like, yes, I could run full homomorphic and we could run so many operations on these blobs of data and blah, blah, blah. Andy Bechtulichime is an investor, and Index wrote a small check. We all got excited, wrote a small check. 3 years later, like, you know, again, shut the company down. So there are so many of these stories that we find in our journey, and I couldn't agree more about luck, humility, market timing.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:I mean, these are things that are completely outside our control. You have this view of working with founders. I love the 5 questions that you sort of present to them and force their thinking into being very precise and crisp. What advice do you give them to stay tenacious like you have been, to build a culture like you did at Tenable, and more importantly, not to lose this essence of being a good human being.
Ron Gula:So it's it's different for every founder, this this concept of, you know, being a good human being, like, what is the right thing to do? And and, you know, just like many funds, you know, we had companies that had to do layoffs, you know, over the last year or 2 years, and they had to cut to profitability. That's tough. Right. So I really felt like some cases board meeting, very antiseptic.
Ron Gula:Hey, this was done. Maybe call the founder after. Hi. How'd it go? Right.
Ron Gula:Like, are, are you doing okay? Right. You know, where, where are you at? Right. So a little bit of that.
Ron Gula:Sometimes it's a little bit of, look, you have to do this or you will be out of business in 6 months, and that's that's tough. Right? Having said that, I've also been involved with a lot of companies who have just had, you know, great cultures. They've really nailed it. Some of the founders I'm working with are wise beyond their years as far as building a culture and rapidly, you know, removing people who might be a counter to that culture and and that sort of thing.
Ron Gula:But but what I found is, like, my style is not everybody else's style. So I'm a little hands off when I let people run the companies the way they wanna run them. It's their companies, you know, that that kind of thing. But there's a lot of ways you can do things. But also, you know, being a CEO today in 2024, when you look at the world politics, we look at what's going on in the country, it's a lot different than when I was CEO, right?
Ron Gula:There's a number of things you got to do, you got a lot of legal things, you got a lot of political things, you got a sensitivity things. So I do spend a little bit of time, you know, making sure people are not overly focused on things that aren't aren't counterintuitive to their business. But at the same time, you've got to be sensitive to all of those kind of things as well. What I really like is when my portfolio comes to work with each other. So I've got a couple OEMs and cross customers, cross licenses.
Ron Gula:That hardly ever happens in the industry, and I think the fact that we have any, I'm quite happy about that. And we also we do our Gula Tech event parties and cigar parties and that sort of thing, and that's always again, I like that cigars and bourbon. Some people might not drink. They might not smoke. They don't have to come, but it's you get to kinda do things that you wanna do.
Ron Gula:But that's how we kind of bring that culture kinda back to, to everybody else.
Sid Trivedi:Well, for the last part, you know, as we get come to the end of this session with you, Ron, we wanted to talk a little bit about Ron the influencer. And perhaps the first big question I have is you have this organization, Gula Tech Adventures, but alongside Cyndi, you also have Gula Tech Foundation. And with Gula Tech Foundation, you're trying to support nonprofits, and your mission is to defend the nation's cyberspace. Could you give us a sense for what are the problems you're trying to solve? How does the foundation even work?
Sid Trivedi:And what are the types of initiatives that you hope the foundation will support?
Ron Gula:So when when we first started Gula Tech Adventures, you know, we've always been philanthropic. We would put we would do a donation. I I think one of the first ones we did was select Npower. Npower is a great organization that just helps people who can't, you know, get the education they want in cyber. I didn't kind of put them through a system, helps them find a job.
Ron Gula:Great. But we would list those things almost like investments on the website. We used to have a website with our portfolio companies and our philanthropy. But what we weren't doing is we didn't have the bandwidth to join the boards of all those, come in and work with them on a daily basis and stuff. So we were we really wanted to do something that could help them the most without I mean, with a small organization without tying up our time.
Ron Gula:So Cyndi's idea was to, you know, do the foundation and basically make it a competition. And because what happened is we get these pitch decks. People just email. They find us on LinkedIn. Oh, I want you to look at this deck.
Ron Gula:Well, we'd read the deck, and this is where we came up with the 5 slide pitch deck, by the way. We're reading this, and we're like, we really don't know. Is this a nonprofit or is this a for profit company? Right? Some people's decks weren't that good.
Ron Gula:And then from that, not only do we get the 5 slide pitch deck, but we realized the nonprofits journey was basically identical to a startups journey. But rather than raising a seed a, b, and c, you know, if you got a maybe a a grant from a foundation, maybe you could get a grant from Department of Homeland Security. I don't think people are aware how much the federal government gives to nonprofits in cyber for, you know, for example. And maybe if you do that, maybe you get even bigger grant from, like, Microsoft or Google or something like that. And that's exactly what goes on in there.
Ron Gula:So we recognize that design pattern and said, we're gonna just not write checks and not talk about. We're gonna make it a competition and make a big deal. So we got a a grant committee, And we also want to be very purposeful. And so we did topic to topic to topics. So one of the topics first topics we did was increasing African American engagement in in cybersecurity.
Ron Gula:So nonprofits out there that, that focused on that sort of thing. And we've done about 7 of these grants. We didn't do a grant this year. We're very focused on just we're we're kinda retooling a little bit. We're gonna probably make some announcements down the road.
Ron Gula:But the grant structure was really good. Almost everybody that received a grant from us went on to get a bigger grant from somebody else, much like in the venture capital world. So I'm very happy about that. We list everything at if you go to gula.tech, gula.tech, go to the foundation page, they're all listed there. Sometimes we've done videos with these these organizations to get a sense of what they are.
Ron Gula:My last plug for people, look, in cyber, there's a lot of people who have the imposter syndrome. I don't know why that is, because I think everybody I meet is really, really good. But, man, you wanna feel like you're giving back, volunteer at a nonprofit. It doesn't necessarily even have to be a cyber nonprofit. Go to your local hospital, go to your go to your town and just see what you can do.
Ron Gula:And believe me, you can do a lot. The nation needs everybody in cyber to do, you know, do their
Ross Haleliuk:part. Talking about different ways of influencing the industry. Over the past several years, I've built venture insecurity. And last year, it has achieved over 500 1,000 reads, which is, it's it's a lot for a blog. And, frankly, I know how hard it is to create consistently valuable content.
Ross Haleliuk:Given that your YouTube channel, as of right now, has over 100,000 subscribers, what motivated you to start creating a content? How much time do you allocate to do it? What does the process, for you look like?
Ron Gula:So it's it's interesting. When we first started the the YouTube channel, I it was I was going more for, like, a Joe Rogan type of thing. I put a lot of effort into being able to sit down with good quality microphones in person, and then COVID happened. Right? So I literally, I mean, we do this out of our out of our home.
Ron Gula:I'm having strangers well, not strangers, but you know what I mean. People come in the house and sit there and do the interview. And, you know, we do some and and we were able to score some really interesting interviews back then, like the the cast of the reboot of MacGyver and and stuff like that. But, you know, getting a following I mean, Ross, you're very gracious to bring bring that up, but it's no small task. Like, you've gotta be on top of the content and the the SEO and and just do things in the right right things.
Ron Gula:But for us, when we switched from doing the live interviews to more just me talking about a topic with some fancy graphics or something like that, that seemed to really resonate with a lot of people, so I've doubled down on that. We've been doing, like, 1 episode a week. We're up to, like, 250 episodes. And, you know, I think the fancy graphics help, but that's a gimmick. It's I think the content is really what sells.
Ron Gula:The other thing is that it's not just cyber. Like, we focus on start up messaging. So, you know, we'll do how to name your company, but we'll also do, like, obtuse con topics like, you know, what when should you defer salary if you're having payroll, you know, if you're having cash flow issues. Right? And that's a tough thing to talk about.
Ron Gula:But but that got that seemed to resonate with a lot of people. So we're quite happy with that that following, and we're gonna keep putting some more effort into it. I, I really like every everybody says they know AI. So my excuse for spending time with the graphics is everything I do has some sort of AI technology behind it. So I feel like I'm working with with AI.
Ron Gula:If you've seen some of the videos where the characters just talk to each other, 100% AI generated. Didn't move a key frame or anything like that for that stuff. So it's crazy how far that technology comes.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:So Ron, here you are, 3 decades of innovation, entrepreneurship. Now you're giving back to the community with a very big heart. So look at the first phase of cybersecurity. It's about demonstrating your intellect, demonstrating your ego, demonstrating your skill. And now you're here demonstrating a big heart in your philanthropy and, the work you're doing with your videos, which, by the way, are so cool.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:In fact, I particularly enjoyed the one where you talk about how a booth can be designed so that it attracts the right kind of traffic in a show like RSA. It's such a simple topic, but nobody has done that. So thank you for continuing to keep your creative juices alive and continuing to innovate yourself. I think for a lot of us, you will be the Joe Rogan of cybersecurity, or you might be the top gun, you know, Air Force pilot for cybersecurity. But as we look at your next phase of your journey, how do you continue to challenge yourself?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:How do you think about what the next 5, 10 years of Cyndi and Ron Gula would look like?
Ron Gula:Thank you for those comments. I mean, we put a lot of effort into the investing, the philanthropy, and getting that out. So I appreciate those comments. You know, I I think if anything, anybody's gonna try to predict the next 5 years is it's tough. I think we've got a good view of things because we get pitched a lot of stuff.
Ron Gula:So there's a couple couple things. So like, we spend a lot of time with policymakers, and everybody wants to know how can we get the DOD more secure? How can we get the nation more secure? And I mean, we've seen so many different things. Our answer there is we want we want people to think of, you know, IT and and data, like health care, and just call it data care.
Ron Gula:And I was literally like, I'm an advisor for the Military Cyber Professionals Association. And we had a I I don't wanna go into a whole lot, but the comment was, look. Even though this is the military, you know, some of this stuff is carrying feeding you the data, and it it's kinda we need to make the people who are are patching the systems feel like they're just as important as the people who are hacking Iran and and, China and Russia. So in unless until we have that mindset, you know, where we can get cyber people to be just as well respected as a doctor or a lawyer, you know, I think we're gonna have a a hard time there. And the second thing we're tracking is AI.
Ron Gula:And, I mean, I think there's a lot of opportunities for productivity and for the betterment of humanity, you know, with AI in general. But there's a lot of opportunities for things to happen where, you know, only certain companies control the AI and, you know, they get to see what we're asking kinda like what happens now when we query Google and and stuff like that. And that that can really, really hurt society, especially if things go a little bit more draconian than than they have been, you know, in the past. So we're tracking a lot of that stuff. You know, there's disinformation is such a big problem right now.
Ron Gula:I'm actually working on a video where I have somebody from the future come back to RSA, and they have a conversation about how they they, do things. And they literally say, well, you know, we really don't know much about IT security from the 2000 because of the AI and disinformation wars. Right? And it's, so you you never know what's gonna happen. Right?
Ron Gula:But that's really what we're looking at. We're blessed. We we do a lot of really fun things, and we get to go to a lot of fun places, but we're pretty focused. I I mean, every year I go to RSA, and I'm like, this is my last RSA. I'm never going back.
Ron Gula:And then I leave, and I go, oh my god. That was so much better than what I thought it was. I'll come back next year. And, you know, it's it's important the work everybody's doing.
Sid Trivedi:Well, thank you so much, Ron, for being so generous today with your time talking about pre Tenable, the early years, the formative years, starting 2 companies, then starting Tenable, then your investing background, all of the work you're doing today to influence the industry. For our listeners, what's the best way to connect with Ron, hear more about Ron? Should they just search Goolatech Adventures, or is there a specific channel or or way you want folks to subscribe to you?
Ron Gula:LinkedIn's the easiest way. So I'm Ron Gula on LinkedIn. You know, I got my start in computers from my dad. My dad's also Ron Gula, and he has a LinkedIn account. So if you see a guy without a picture that doesn't have gray that has gray hair more than mine, that's not me.
Ron Gula:That's my dad. But having said that, LinkedIn's fine. You know, if you come to the YouTube channel, check it out. You know, what what I'm always looking for is if people have questions. Like, I usually get people, hey.
Ron Gula:Can I come pick your brain? I'm like, that's one of my most annoying ask because I do wanna say yes. But I'm like, chances are the questions you have, I've already watched. I've already done a video on. So my feeling is if I haven't answered somebody's question, send me that question.
Ron Gula:I'll make a video, and, we can we can talk about it. So, that's the best way to get ahold of us.
Sid Trivedi:Thanks so much, Ron. Thank you.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Thank you Ron.
Ron Gula:Hey. Thanks for the opportunity, and, good luck with your launch, guys. It's, it's it's gonna be great. You've got some great guests coming up.
Sid Trivedi:Thank you for joining us Inside the Network.
Ross Haleliuk:If you like this episode, please leave us a review and share it with others.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:If you really, really liked it and you have some feedback for us, wrap it on a bottle of Yamazaki and send it to me first.
Sid Trivedi:No. Don't do that. Mahendra gets too many gifts already. Please reach out by email or LinkedIn.
