CyberWire Daily - Julian Waits: Find a way to help society. [Serial Entrepreneur] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

Senior Vice President and Executive in Residence with Rapid7 and Chairman for Cyversity, Julian Waits, grew up in the era of the Justice League and Superman and it shaped his career. Julian always wanted to do something where he could find a way to help society to basically help others. Starting out as a Baptist minister with aspirations of being a professional musician, Julian found it more practical to take some technology classes and practice his saxophone when he had time. His first tech job was at Texaco where he worked on early networks and moved into systems engineering at Compaq. Julian notes his ADD made coding less attractive than talking with others to solve problems and Compaq provided him with opportunities to pivot. Searching out diversity, Julian moved to DC, and had his first taste of startups. He now describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. We thank Julian 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 Julian Waits, and I'm the Senior Vice President and Executive in Residence with RAPID7, as well as the Chairman for Cyversity. When I was a kid, I grew up in the era of the Justice League and Superman and everything. And I always wanted to do something where I could find a way to help society, to basically help others, protect others.

I always thought that was going to be a military career or something like that. Didn't work out, but that was my assumption as a child. I was for a while a Baptist minister, And I was very much into music, being from New Orleans, Louisiana. Jazz and gospel was my thing, and so I thought I was going to be like a church musician and a minister. As I was leaving high school,

going to college, and I also got married early, it occurred to me that to be a professional musician, I probably needed to be a little bit. And it became incredibly obvious to me that I was never going to be a professional musician and I need to figure something else out. And I always had a knack for math and science.

And so I took a few classes at Loyola and some classes that were very important at Ziva University in New Orleans, which basically changed the trajectory of my life. And that was when I developed an interest in computer technology. In terms of my actual career, my real start started at Texaco. And it was specifically Texaco in New Orleans. I started in the computer operations department, rolling up plots that were printing off of very large machines that petroleum engineers were developing for, you know, here's where we should go to the well or explore if a well could be here.

And the sneaking reason I also did it is I took the night shift and I could practice on my saxophone at night without bothering anybody once my work obligations were done, say five, six hours into it. But then I developed a love for doing maintenance programming on the digital equipment corporation, Vax Mainframes, and turned into digital command language, turned into Pascal, turned into C. And next thing you know, I was a maintenance programmer working in the computer department at Texaco. I was the first person to run the networks, computer networks. So this was right when personal computers were introduced into corporate environments. And we had these things everywhere, and nobody could figure out how you were supposed to connect them up together.

They gave me some training and all this other stuff, and I became a Banyan Network Certified Engineer. stuff and I became a Banyan Network Certified Engineer. That then led to me moving on to Compact Computer Corporation, now HP. I was like a kid in a candy store. I went into his systems engineering group where it was really the convergence of hardware, operating systems from an endpoint perspective, and network operating systems. And they paid for all the training I could get. They helped me learn better coding skills. I just really blossomed there. And then I realized at some point there was this thing called ADD, which I live with every day. And that put me in a position where I hated coding. I wanted to be out talking to people and working with people.

And then Compaq gave me the opportunity to start doing pre-sales type stuff as well. And that was when I found my first passion for, back to the protection thing we talked about earlier, being able to provide people with computers in a secure fashion to help them do things and protect their assets at the same time. It wasn't even a thing called cybersecurity. People used the word cyber back then. It just meant it was digital. It had nothing to do with security. But even back then, security was a concern, especially when it came to compliance. I moved to Washington, D.C., primarily because I wanted to be in an environment that was

highly diverse. You know, you go to Boston and let's just say everybody all looked the same. You know, you go to Boston and let's just say everybody all looked the same. But the high tech scene in D.C., Baltimore, Northern Virginia area was very diverse. And I really liked that. And that's when I became a first time CEO. You know, I worked for a company, E-Security. I left there and started my first startup called Bravian, where I was co-founder because I had several. And we raised $10 million in our first round,

and we were off to the races. I started what I'm doing now, which is serial entrepreneur. I love coming into early-stage companies, or in the case like I am here at Rapid7 and bringing me into an environment that's very mature, but they've got some things that they would like to do that would be more entrepreneurial.

And so I'm being given the opportunity to help define what those things are, create a business plan and launch those new businesses from within the company. And I think it's a great fit for both of us. My parents raised me with the desire to always ask why and understand how something works. Starting with the why. The why is always what's the problem that cybersecurity customers are trying to solve? It's basically, how do I mitigate my risk?

And our market is no longer a question of whether you're going to be compromised or not. The question is, is what's the materiality of it and how fast can I catch it after the fact? But it's also being able to listen and understand what the problems are and then come back with solutions that really make things better rather than making things worse. The first word of wisdom is something that my father used to say, but he didn't create it. You can't be it unless you can see it. Find a mentor in the industry that you're interested in. Even if you don't know exactly what it is, find some people that are doing things that you think are interesting in is always that you have to have a demonstrated

better than average capability with mathematics before you can actually use a computer and that's just a fallacy i mean if you look at it and then cyber as a subset there's still a very low representation of minorities and women in the field. It's still considered to be a math-oriented, white male-dominated thing. Right now, in North America alone, there are well over a million job openings in and around the ideal of performing cybersecurity. This is not necessarily cyber analysts or people who do digital forensics and then the next hurdle is but that's way too hard no it isn't if i told you how my career started here you know early on in the early days and there's so much more information i mean

you can get all the training you need for free on youtube when I'm ready to hang up my hat and it's time to it's time to move on to that pasture I hope people look back at my work and what they see first is exactly how I started the conversation that I wanted to help and protect people. And I hope in their lives, with everybody that I've ever touched or talked to, that they feel in some way that that occurred. Secondarily, I hope they can look around themselves and say with the information that was shared with them by me and others in my network, that it did allow them to live potentially a better life than potentially would have had going a different route

than in cyber or whatever it happens to be. And now, a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cybercriminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Thank you. and their families 24-7, 365 with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io.