The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Andrew Kahl, CEO of BackBox, Transforming Network and Security Automation

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

Andrew Kahl, CEO of BackBox, Transforming Network and Security Automation Backbox.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show. 15 years we've been bringing you the most amazing minds, brilliant people, people that have spent a whole lifetime building their lives,

learning from lessons, going through cathartic moments, and testing it all out so they could share it with you on the Chris Voss Show and give us the glow. The CEOs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the people who run our governments and different things have all been on the show sharing us with their journey. And this is the condensed version of what you get of a lifetime of brilliance and mindset of people in the thing. So please share the show with your family, friends, or relatives.

Go to Goodreads.com, Fortunes, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortunes, Chris Voss. Subscribe to that big LinkedIn newsletter. I didn't know there were many people active on LinkedIn. Go to the 130,000 group on LinkedIn as well. Go to Chris Voss. Subscribe to that big LinkedIn newsletter. I didn't know there were many people active on LinkedIn. Go to the 130,000 group on LinkedIn as well. Go to Chris Voss 1. I don't know why I'm hating on LinkedIn this morning. And chrisfossfacebook.com. We have an amazing gentleman on the show.

He is the CEO of a company called Backbox.com. We're going to be talking about what he does and also his entrepreneurial journey, his building of different companies, etc., etc. And you're going to be talking about what he does and also his entrepreneurial journey, his building of different companies, etc., etc. And you're going to learn a lot here. And if you don't, well, then there'll be a test afterwards. Andrew Call joins us on the show with us today. He's been building models of customer service or, I'm sorry, customer success.

Officially, I'm a big customer service fan. I think I read Tom Peter' book too many times. So Andrew has been building models of customer success before the term officially entered the business vernacular. As the CEO of Backbox, a market leader in network automation, security, and network management solutions, he operates with customers in mind,

both inside and outside of the organization. Before leaving Blackbox, Andrew was a VP of Customer Success Delivery at NetApp, the first Chief Customer Officer at SailPoint, and co-founder at Credent Technologies, a leading security software firm that was acquired by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the show, Andrew. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thanks for the introduction and being included in that list. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. Go ahead. No, you're fine.

It's all good. Thank you and welcome to the show. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, it's www.backbox.com. Not to be confused with Black Box. Those are in airplanes. We are backbox.com. Backbox.

There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you guys do there. Yeah, as you said, we're a network automation solution. So we do device backup and instant restore for network configuration. We do automation for all the OS updates and patches for things like routers, firewalls, and switches that connect to your network. We do configuration compliance, audits, remediation, basically the vulnerability management of your network, making sure that everything is authorized to be there, is up and running and working.

And God forbid, if your network goes down, we can restore the configuration very quickly. So we do pretty cool stuff. And what size companies are these for? We are, essentially anybody can use us, but the core of our customer base is really the mid-market. So think SMB, then mid-market, then enterprise. We're mid-market and small enterprise, although we do have some large enterprise customers.

There you go. And so it seems kind of obvious, but what are some of the problems you guys bring to solution for customers? What are some pain points? Is it being attacked or being, what's it called, denial of service attacks, hackers, et cetera? It's a little bit of everything. I think the biggest thing is chaos and complexity that's entering the network environment of most enterprises. As companies grow, whether it's people, new offices, organic growth, inorganic growth, the complexity on a network is growing and growing,

and the number of networks running within an enterprise is growing significantly. So the more devices you have, the more time-consuming it is for you to update those to ensure that they're compliant. And so the biggest thing that we do is really productivity and time savings as well as significant financial positive impact. When you can automate a task and you don't have to apply manpower to it, it gets done much, much quicker. And so you can redeploy that.

When you have to run around and back up and restore everything and do firmware upgrades and, you know, all that sort of stuff. Like even all the WordPresses that we have, we have to go into a back panel and tell it to update all that crap. Yeah, exactly. And then I imagine vulnerability management as well. I see on your site. Exactly. Keeping an inventory. That's probably important too if you're a company. Well, a lot of companies just don't know how many network security devices they have connected to their network.

And so number one, that's a problem in and of itself. And then to your point, taking the time to update and patch all those is tremendous. I mean, think of your own. Everybody's got a network at home. Just the other day, I was actually upgrading our network at home. I have 35 devices in my home connected from Apple TV to computers. That's just in one house. Now, we don't serve consumers, but think about an enterprise and how many hundreds and thousands of devices they've got to update.

Oh, yeah. If you think for a large company or mid-sized company, that's insane. Yeah, I look at that every now and then on my router, and I'm just like, who are these people that are connected to my thing? Exactly. What's going on here? They don't belong there. There's probably some Chinese spy in there somewhere. Espionage is always fun, though.

So tell us a little bit about your hero's journey. How did you end up as the CEO of Backbox? How did you grow up? What made you want to be an entrepreneur, et cetera, et cetera? Give us a little bit. hero's journey. How did you end up as the CEO of Backbox? How did you grow up? What made you want to be an entrepreneur, et cetera, et cetera? Give us a little bit. Yeah, this is a fun question. I think everybody's got different answers. So I live in Dallas, Texas right now.

Backbox is headquartered here in Dallas. But I grew up in the Midwest. And Midwest has got this kind of hardworking work ethic. My grandfather is from Iowa. And he literally, you know, back in the 1920s, he was worked for the phone company, and he would dig holes, put the telephone pole in those string the wires for all the rural farmers out there. And then he but he retired as vice president. So I share that story story because he was a guy that just would grind it out um and work really hard and that work ethic stuck with me same with my father um and so in my dna has

always been work really hard to get to something and so building is what i like i like building things i've i was fortunate enough to very early on be part of a company that IPO'd. I joined a company fairly early in my career. I think I was employee number 82. They were at $4 million in revenue. And by the time I'd left six and a half years later, we'd done $1.1 billion in revenue. We had 6,000 employees and we IPO'd along the way. Wow.

And so I kind of got the bug then. That's all about building. I love to build, and so that's what I do. That's kind of been the genesis of my career. Was this your first company that you ever started? No, not Backbox. The first company I started, so after the one that I just referenced, I did start a company with two other gentlemen.

It was called Credent Technologies. We were a data encryption security software company. And so we started that in September of 2001. And if you remember what happened in September 2001, it was kind of an auspicious time in the world. But we started a company, and we grew it. And we landed our first customer, which was PepsiCo. A lot of luck and moxie along the way. And then we just started to grow and grow.

And we ran that for 12 years. And then, as you said, we sold it to Dell. And that was a lot of fun to see something you created get acquired by a great brand name like Dell. And so that was the first company that I started. And I ended up here at Backbox because the venture capital firm that funded our startup company are the same people that own Backbox. And we'd always maintained a relationship. And so they asked me to step in and help lead Backbox to the next phase of growth. So that's how I got here. There you go. And you've been there for how long now? Two and a half years.

There you go. So what are some of the leadership principles you brought into when you came in the company or different ways that you made changes to improve what was going on there? Yeah, this is a fun question too because this is one that you don't know early in your career and it takes time to figure it out. But for me, one of the first thing was make sure that I've got good people around me because I don't have all the answers. Nobody has all the answers. And so that was number one.

Then once you get the good people around you build a plan and collaborate in building that plan, then make sure all the employees know what that plan is and, you know, what's our objective, what's the outcome we're looking for. And then the last thing, Chris, is just give people autonomy. Let them run. You shouldn't micromanage them and ask for their TPS reports all day long. No.

You know, early in my career, I probably am guilty of micromanaging, but I don't like to be micromanaged, and I know that's not a good thing for folks. Yeah. You speak to what's really important there with leadership and letting people, you know, teaching people, empowering them. You know, I learned very early on with my CEO route that I thought I was the purveyor of all the great ideas in the world when it came to innovating. But very soon it became apparent to me that I didn't have all the good ideas. Some were really bad. And some were downright expensive. So trying to create a learning organization within our companies to empower people to feel like they could contribute ideas, that it was a safe place to say, hey, boss, you know, there's probably a better way to do this than the way you did it. And, you know, not be caught up with my ego where I'm like, I'm the center of authority on knowledge.

There's no way you could, you know. Exactly. Yeah. And I've fallen into that trap too i think part of it is these you know you get to a certain role whether it's a vp or an evp or a c level role you you think that you should have all the answers and that's not always true what you need to do is is orchestrate and facilitate a team of people to come up with the answers it's not you have to be the you know what is it the Oracle or the the crystal ball yourself yeah or the wizard there the wizard there you go

on the thing we're like I command the cease the part nothing happens I'm Gandalf not exactly exactly again probably make it happen but I'm not that nerdy so there you go. What are some of the other things that you've done to build up the company, different changes in culture, different effects that you brought on when you first stepped in and said, you know, when you basically do things kind of fit more to your standards, but also the vision you had for the company?

Yeah. One of the things about Backbox before the private equity firm acquired Backbox, you know, successful company doing well, two really engaging and high personality co-founders were leading it before, but it was kind of run like a family business. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but, you, you know, and so what I've tried to do is just put more discipline in place. You know, we've got, we've got organization, we've got structure, we've got a, we've got a top line objective. We've got growth objectives. We've got sales objectives, we've got product objectives.

And so you start to align around those cause they all need to come together, you know, in the end. And so once we started to really put structure in place, I think that was really, really helpful just to get people on board. Some people self-selected out. We had to make some tough changes to figure out who was on the bus

as they say. And that's something that's never fun, but you got to do it. So you fired Cousin Vinny and Gomer? We did, yeah. I think Otis was in there too. Otis was in there too, yeah.

There you go. Gen Z kids right now are going. They're like, who's Otis? Who's Gomer? Yeah. There you go. What's a Gomer? Watch Andy Griffith, the Andy Griffith Show kids.

You'll catch up. Wasn't there an Otis in that show? I don't know. Yeah, there was. Otis was a personable guy, but not reliable. 55 years old. The brain can't remember half the shit, but I can remember that. What is going on?

What is going on? I don't know. Maybe it's coming back. So with Backbox, you guys' software does all this stuff. Does it use AI yet? Have you guys delved into the AI? You know, everyone's doing AI. Yeah, you know, so short answer is no, not yet.

But it is, in all seriousness, though, it is something that we're discussing in terms of our product roadmap and our long-term strategy. We're having customers asking us about AI. And that's an interesting conversation because one of our... Like they know what it is anyway. Well, that's the thing. I mean, you've got everybody all of a sudden is an expert on AI. I've got 20 years of AI and according to your LinkedIn profile, you were a realtor last week. So I don't know where the experts come from. You say that like it's a bad thing. No, it's not. It's not. It's just my point, though, is I think with AI, I think there's a lot of value there. if you start to put this in your technology, we want to know because we need to understand

how that could impact our environment. Remember the Terminator, the machines take over? Yeah, the Skynet. I was just going to pull that Skynet joke out. Yeah, exactly. Well, no, but it's... It launches the missiles. Exactly, but it's serious.

I mean, there's one of the world's largest telecom companies is a customer of ours. And that's a concern that they've got is that if AI is leveraged too much in the software of the vendors that they've got running their infrastructure, they've got a concern around that. Yeah. So it's something, you know, I need to think about as we think about our product strategy. You don't want an AI system sending dick pics to everyone on their text message at the phone company there. Yeah. No, that would be bad.

I don't even know what that looks like. I don't want to know either. This is what we talk about when we talk about AI. So, you know, the interesting thing about AI, I don't want to do a riff on that for a second. I was listening to Sam Harris' thing, and he said, you know, one of the interesting things about us as humans and AI is, you know, our main paradigm runs around propagating the species. We're designed, Mother Nature has us here to breed, you know, spread the DNA,

get enough variables of the DNA so that the species survives and maybe evolves a little bit. I don't know. I've seen this lately. But that's basically our whole paradigm. And that's our operating thing. We do everything to propagate the species. Everything a guy buys is to impress women and secure women. And it's all about breeding and having kids and propagating the species. And that's pretty much it. But when it comes to AI and these supercomputers of the future,

they're going to have a different paradigm, and they're not going to be limited by us, where we're just going to be busy chasing skirts and looking at, hey, who's that, guy or girl? These AI systems are going to think from a totally different dominant i don't know if dominance right word but they're going to think much bigger than we are by an expansive level i don't know what do you think about that thought no i think i think you're right i mean we have a tendency to think more and more and more grow grow grow i mean you look at the expectations on wall street grow grow grow you look at the expectations that people have they first house want a bigger house want more cars more, more. I think to your point with AI, I think

it's going to be more controlling. It's going to say, okay, look at the variables, look at the data. Now we need to put controls in place. So this growth that while there's always going to be a growth mentality, I think you're right. I think AI is going to start to look at things and it's going to read the data and say, hey, we've got problems with population. We've got problems with land mass. And there could be some good that comes out of it, but it might also really start to impact the free will of mankind.

And that's where the Skynet comes into play. It may just figure out we're all idiots because it doesn't have to work know it has to it doesn't have to work for a paycheck you know we spend most of our lives personally you know running around trying to impress women and men so they can mate with us trying to make enough money to pay you know for the kids and the bills and and uh the clothes that can get people to mate with us you know all that stuff um that's pretty much what we do all our lives you know if we're not if we're not trying to mate we're taking care of the kids that that are bred and propagating the species trying to get enough resources so that you know this things carry on trying to

make the governments work so that you know the kids can have a government next year whatever um but you know these these ai things they're not even thinking about that stuff. They don't care. They're not lost in the minutia of, like, I need a date tonight. You know, they're going to be thinking about, like, I don't know, what's the end of the universe look like? What is, I don't know, how to solve, you know, whatever problems may. But I never really thought about that. I'm like, holy crap, I'm really intimidated now by AI.

Because it's going to outthink us at so many levels. No, it definitely is. I mean, look how it's being used right now. It's being used in a lot of simple ways. People talk about chat GPT and writing papers or things of that nature. I mean, that's just step number one. And I've read some of the stuff that chat GPT has put out. You can put inflection and tone in there so it sounds

like it's you or me. It's hard to differentiate. And this is just, you know, version one of what's going to be many, many versions of AI that's coming out. So very early. Lots to be seen and done over the years. The other thing was that Sam Harris and

the gentleman talked about, I believe it was what's his face? Who's the big dome head guy who started Netflix or neck gear back in the day yeah Marc Anderson Marc Anderson so he's talking with Marc Anderson I always make fun of Marc because he he looks like who's that SNL feature where they had the alien guys with the big head oh yeah uh i know i remember cone heads yep yeah cone heads wow take me to your leader uh he has an enormous head but that's probably why he's rich and he's created so many great companies and smart guy and silicon valley yeah he's very smart and so uh he was talking to him and he said you know the thing about

the thing about AI, I think I've lost track of it between the segue of the bald head. But the thing about AI is, yeah, it's not going to mountain Q. So there you go. It's going to be an interesting time. I guess let's just put it that way. Oh, the thing about it, the thing he was espousing to Sam Harris is he goes, you know, we've basically put all of us into,

AI will be the grand sum total of all the goodness of human beings. And so, like, it'll be all of us put together into one sort of form. And Sam Harris is like, yeah, but it's all the worst of us. Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We've got some pretty bad people on the team.

So how does that all come out? I mean, we're still having wars and everything else. So you don't have AI in the product yet, but potentially there. What are some other features of the product we haven't touched on? Yeah, one of the neat things that we do is we have an element called NBM, or Network Vulnerability Manager. And that has the ability to identify within a network where you've got vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities meaning you've got a device that's not working or it needs to be patched or a device that has an upgrade coming out and there might be a vulnerability within that upgrade.

So if you can map that and then we can stack rank and say, okay, of all these vulnerabilities, these are the ones you need to fix today. These are the ones you can put off till tomorrow. And these are the ones that you're screwed if you don't address it right now. And so for an organization with lots of devices,

having the ability to see where those vulnerabilities are within their network and then stack rank them is incredibly powerful. Yeah. We've had a lot of network security guys on the show, and it only takes like one little access point. Oh, yeah. Sometimes just an employee clicking a hack link on an email. I'm sure if you're not, you know, I've learned that the hard way with my WordPress for the Chris Voss show.

If you don't keep those plugins updated, that's usually, you know, where they can sneak in the back doors. Yeah, think of it this way. If your network goes down i mean people say that data is the lifeblood of a company that's true but if your network goes down that data is not flowing that lifeblood's not flowing if the if the data is not flowing then commerce stops and that's a bad thing last time i checked if a hospital can't operate or if a bank can't move money um or if a telecom company you know can't provide its services customers usually get pretty pissed off yeah i usually don't mind because i

don't get bills from them then no i'm just um what about ransomware ransomware is like a huge thing nowadays i think it's much larger than we hear about because a lot of companies don't admit to it, paying payoff on it. Do you guys help combat ransomware? No, that's not an area that we're focused on. I mean, the security space has grown so much. I mean, I started in security in 2001, and back then you were thinking antivirus and firewalls, and then there was military-grade encryption,

and then we started building more commercial-grade encryption. Security now has everything from surface area attack to ransomware to all the other elements I mentioned. So we're not touching that. It doesn't mean we won't, but ransomware is not something that we're letting the experts handle that. Yeah, that's a crazy whole thing. It is, yeah.

If you're plugging your holes in your in your servers and systems it can make everything do um so do you normally work with the security department there at the you know for network security or who do you work with yeah then and that's always a fun part when you get into a sales cycle so we work with both the it organizations and the security organizations and usually they work their hand in hand. We still see some companies that it's security is over here and IT is over here and never the two shall meet. But most are working in tandem because the reality is the CISO is going to say, these are the security and the mandates we've got to have.

IT is the one that's got to implement them. So we're got to have. IT is the one that's got to implement them. So we're selling to both. We sell more directly into the IT organizations than we do a true security part of the team. But they do touch us eventually. There you go. And I see here you have the backup and one-click restore for when disaster recovery is needed. That's probably important, especially with all the weird stuff we have going with the weather these days. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I was referring to. So if your network goes down and you say you've got a thousand devices connected to your network and configured a specific way.

Well, if your network goes down, you've got to bring your network back up. Then you've got to, by hand, try and reconfigure all those devices. That's going to take hours, if not days. Our one-click restore will instantly restore the configuration of how your network was designed. And so that's tremendous time savers for folks. There you go. I've learned the hard way

about using the restore thing. You've got to have that restore in there, man. How do people onboard with you guys? How do they try out the product? How do they get involved? How do they ask for advice or try demo etc etc pretty simple we one of the things that is a big big deal with me is ease of use not only my personal life and products that I like to buy but our products itself we want to make it

really easy to get up and running so a couple things number one we can always do demos of our product with customers. But we recently launched a sandbox on our website. And that sandbox allows, you know, we host the product internally. Customers can get on, test it, do the configurations that they want, set things up, and get a real taste for how the product works without seeing just a canned demo or video or screenshots. And so that sandbox has been really powerful. But getting onboarded with us, one of the great things about Backbox is unlike traditional enterprise software companies, we don't require lots of manpower and lots of services work. Most enterprises get up and running within a matter of weeks.

And I say weeks, meaning like two to three to four on the short end because it is so easy to use and so easy to implement every professional services are very small component of our total revenue there you go so what's the vision you see for black box where do you guys expand into your what do you are you thinking of just expanding with more customers or do you have any sort of innovations or things you're thinking about you could disclose of of course yeah no and this is a fun question i mean first of all world global company i mean the majority of our customers are in in europe we have been growing considerably over the last two years in north america so we're probably 60 european based 40

north america with our customers we're going to get that balanced out. So customer acquisition obviously is important. But we want to expand our platform. And in the realm of IT infrastructure, there's a lot that we can do. So the network backup and restore, the network automation, I think that's always going to be important. Identifying and scanning for all types of devices is something that we've looked at, not just the network security devices. So are there people we could partner with on that?

And then think of all the remediation elements of all the parts of the IT infrastructure, whether it's storage devices and servers. You know, we don't touch those today, but what can we do to ensure that those are compliant, those have their patches and their upgrades? And so my vision is to really be an IT infrastructure platform play where we're doing a number of different things,

not just the backup and restore, not just the security device automation. There you go. Anything we didn't touch on about what you guys do and how you do it? No, look, these are great questions, and you could opine or ramble on Backbox, but the network automation space is getting a lot more press lately. Gartner has been following us as they do with everybody in the space. And so they recently published a report.

So for me and for our team, it's really exciting to see a lot more attention being put on network automation as a whole. And so I think there's a tremendous amount of momentum in front of us. And we'll see how things pan out. There you go. The future will come. And then eventually... Yeah, exactly. And then I can say things like, I'll be backbox. I'll be backbox.

You can pay a guy to say that. I think he's out of work right now. He's just sitting in his house with his donkeys, evidently. Yeah, I guess he's got two of them and they live in the house too miniature donkeys we tried to get him on in fact I think we're still in line to get him on the show for his latest book

Arnold Schwarzenegger so go out and buy his book folks he may be on the show he may not we got it kind of late our request so we kind of blew that one but thank you very much Andrew for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. No, it's been a lot of fun.

I appreciate it. I always love to talk about the company and always good to meet folks. So I appreciate your time. This has been fun. Thank you very much. Thanks, Ron, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss, one of the tickety-tockety. And we did the LinkedIn, do the LinkedIn newsletter, folks, and the 130,000 LinkedIn group.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.