CyberWire Daily - Jim Zufoletti: Building your experience portfolio. [Entrepreneur] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

CEO and co-founder of SafeGuard Cyber Jim Zufoletti shares his journey starting out as an intrepreneur and transformation into a serial entrepreneur in cybersecurity. Jim shares how he got his feet wet working for others as an intrepreneur and catching the entrepreneurial bug in the mid-90s. He has co-founded a number of companies starting with FreeMarkets, a B2B ecommerce company. After that went public and Jim moved on, he went to business school at the University of Virginia and crossed paths with his future co-founder of SafeGuard Cyber. At UVA, Jim was inspired by a professor who exposed him to the effectuation approach to entrepreneurship, Along those lines, Jim recommends those looking to start a business in cyber build their experience portfolio. Jim took what he learned to help build where he is today. His company helps protect the humans in this new digital world with the current work from home environment. And, we thank Jim 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. of you, I was concerned about my data being sold by data brokers. So I decided to try Delete.me. I have to say, Delete.me is a game changer. Within days of signing up, they started removing my personal information from hundreds of data brokers. I finally have peace of mind knowing my data privacy is protected. Delete.me's team does all the work for you with detailed reports so you know exactly what's been done. Take control of your data and keep your private life Thank you. JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and use promo code N2K at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and enter code N2K at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K, code N2K. Hello, my name is Jim Zaffoletti, and I am a serial entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur who has gone back and talked to a lot of business school students about the experience, one of the things that I often like to point out is I was not a lemonade stand entrepreneur. I saw what it was like to be an intrapreneur and I saw that it had some benefits. You get all kinds of resources, but you didn't have the same kind of experience that you had as an independent individual. And so I saw that aspect, so the downsides of staying and being an entrepreneur. And then I started to look around. This is the, at this point, this is the mid nineties and seeing the kind of entrepreneurial culture start to show up. I began to identify a lot more with that than I did with being inside a big company.

I got my founding, co-founding experience as a junior member of a early business-to-business startup called Free Markets. We were a B2B e-commerce company. There were four of us at the founding in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is back in 1995. And it was a tremendous time. This was a classic internet startup experience where we were four. And then by the time I left in 2003, we had gone public. We had over a thousand people worldwide. It was a great run. And my arc there was really sales and general management. Then in 2003, I went to business school at Darden at the University of Virginia, which was a great chance to kind of step away. I actually said, hey, I'm going to stop working for two years and had the fortune or misfortune of running into

my future co-founder, Otavio Freri. And so the two of us started up a business that was based on an idea that he had conceived during our first year. And we did all those things like business plan competition and all of that, and then launched a business while we were in business school that was called OpenQ. And then he and I have done two other businesses successive to OpenCue, Social Safeguard, which was the immediate progenitor of Safeguard Cyber, which is the business that we've been building for the last couple of years. We come from this belief that there's been a tremendous transformation with how employees and companies work in the current environment. And this has been like exacerbated with work from home. So we talk about helping to protect the humans in this new digital world that we're in. And in the current work from home environment, it's not just kind of a broad mission. It's like a life or death mission, because if you didn't have these new digital channels, you wouldn't

have any way to work at this point. I was really lucky when I was at Darden to cross paths with an incredible professor named Sarah Sarasvathy, who espouses a particular approach to entrepreneurship, which is called effectuation. And effectuation is really built around the idea that an entrepreneur needs to think not about kind of a really fixed goal that they're driving to, but a recognition of what are the talents and capabilities

that they and their team bring to the table and what can they achieve with those capabilities? And so if I'm talking to a new entrepreneur or somebody who's thinking about it, you know, what's going through my head is, have they built some degree of an experienced portfolio? And then secondly, do they have that effectual mindset? If they come to me and they say, I'm going to build a unicorn by building this business in this specific way, that's really probably something that they're going to find that they're going to have to make adjustments. And quite frankly, it's the ability to make adjustments that is, you know, kind of part and parcel of the entrepreneurial experience.

real experience. I feel really lucky to be in a moment right now where I am doing something that is arguably the best thing that I would be able to do, which is the act of creating and starting businesses. And it would be great to continue to be viewed as somebody who loves and enjoys and likes to share the joy associated with being an entrepreneur. I would tell you the current business, because again, we focus on that kind of protecting the human in the digital world, becomes a really powerful mission, which is, you know, think about the future of humanity. Our digital identities become more and more important to us. Our company's mission is about that, is about recognizing that evolution that's taking place

and protecting those individuals associated with that. So I guess it would also be valuable to be remembered for that. But at the end of the route, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a family man, a father of four. And, you know, that's I guess what motivates me and how I'd like to be remembered. Thank you.