CyberWire Daily - Brandon Robinson: Built from the ground up. [Career Notes]

Episode Date: September 13, 2020

Cybersecurity Sales Engineer Brandon Robinson shares how he built his career in technology and the barriers he experienced along the way. He talks about how his job involves him interacting with customers at the highest levels making sure their solution is meeting needs. In addition, Brandon describes how as a black man and a trailblazer, he's been met with resistance. His positive spin on moving ahead involves relying on himself. Brandon's advice: find your passion, don't be intimidated and you will be met with success. Our thanks to Brandon for sharing his story with us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. My name is Brandon Robinson. I am a senior sales engineer for Proofpoint. I'd always had a passion for math, so I guess it kind of makes sense how that led to tech. So once I got introduced to tech, which was in a trade school, after my first year of college, I loved it.

The trade school was really great because I went in into college, you know, in 1999. Right. And I didn't know how to create an email address or anything. So they literally built me from the ground up like they taught you. This was like in 2000. So, you know, in 2000, you were everything like you were to network security, network admin. So they taught us essentially all the concepts of networking, how to build a computer. You know, so that's the A-plus track. Then they taught us, this was in the days of Windows NT 4.0. So then they taught us like how to build that up, how to do the servers and some other like the application aspect of it.

It really laid a very, very solid foundation for me. I am at Proofpoint now. I am a senior sales engineer. corporations and having conversations with CISOs, CIOs, talking about their security, you know, architecture, their structure, their vision. You know, in some ways, you're a consultant because you have to know more than just, you know, your current technology, right? You have to understand how everything kind of connects and plays together. And then from that, you're advising them on what the best, you know, what the best route forward is. And you're also trying to prove to them that, you know, obviously the proof point for me, the proof point solution will be a good fit for them. Right. So that's a lot of what I do, like presentations, meetings, proof of concepts, working with people to evaluate our technology and, you know, working with existing customers

to make sure that they're satisfied with our technology. One of the things that people should understand is, you know, for me or what I'd like to share, a lot of times I've been the first, the first to do something. But, you know, in being the first and the trailblazer, you usually experience a lot of the resistance. So I've experienced extreme racism from people attempting to sabotage me, people attacking my character, saying that I wasn't great at leading, even though I was leading multiple teams and people who were white, I was doing the work for them. And they never held them accountable, yet they would call me out while I was doing the counterpart's job. So I think people don't understand how difficult it is and how much, you know, as a black man, you usually internalize because proving that people are treating you and doing things race that are race related to you. The burden of proof was so heavy that black people just learned how to adjust within the system, right? You learn to pick and choose your battles.

And you really just learn, honestly, how to rely on yourself, like to be confident, to know you're doing great. And that is what's, you know, made it very easy for me to be successful. Don't be intimidated. Don't be intimidated. I know starting off, there's so many routes and avenues that you can go inside of tech. The first thing I would say is make sure it's really what you want to do, right? Like a lot of people choose careers because the money's good in that area. But that should never be a person's drive, right?

First, let it be something that you're passionate about. Because when it's something that you're passionate about, you're going to make money because you're going to put more into it than you normally would, right? So it's something you love, you do it for free. So I'd say make sure that you're passionate about it and then give yourself time. I think that we live in an age of instant success. And some of that is because social media can be used as highlights, right? Like everyone's showing you their wins, but they're not showing you their struggles, their doubts, the moments they wanted to give up. So I would say be easy on yourself, you know, take your time to grow and build your career. People want to make six figures like starting off in six months. And that's just not realistic, right?

Like you want to build your skill set up to where your skill set demands six figures or more. So that's what I would advise. Cyber threats are evolving every second. Thank you. ThreatLocker is a full suite of solutions designed to give you total control, stopping unauthorized applications, securing sensitive data, and ensuring your organization runs smoothly and securely. Visit ThreatLocker.com today to see how a default-deny approach can keep your company safe and compliant.