The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Gary Guseinov, C.E.O. at RealDefense Interview

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Gary Guseinov, C.E.O. at RealDefense Interview Realdefen.se

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. 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 roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.

Hey, coming to you from another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you tuning in. Let me check my notes here. See something funny and improv a really interesting but crazy somewhat stupid ramble wait that's not what i'm supposed to read anyway guys thanks for tuning in we guys really appreciate being here we had a uh guest author i actually don't think that comes out till tonight for the book bounded and he was calling in from the france and he's like i love your rambles the improv r rambles. And I go, I didn't know they were called rambles.

And so you'll see that show coming out later tonight on his amazing book, The Wall Street Journal, two Wall Street journalists that were on the show. And he's like, I love your ramble. And I'm like, I didn't know it was called. I just improvised something at the beginning of the show. So there's your ramble, kids. Whatever. I'd read you my other list that I have, but that's just milk, eggs, meat, cheese.

It's the grocery list. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys. Welcome to the show. We're a family that loves you but doesn't judge you. At least, you know, mostly. I mean, we judge a couple people. If I meet you in person, I might judge you.

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That's always a good thing to do. Of course, you can go to our consulting thing at chrissvossleadershipinstitute.com. We're going across the screen there, so it gave me a chance to read it. We have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's going to be talking about his company, his startups, what he's built, how he's doing it, and how it's done. Gary Kusinov is on the show with us today. He's the Chief Executive Officer at Real Defense. Gary, did I get your name right? You got it. There you go. I practice hard. I'm good at

practicing. Welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing excellent. Thanks for having me. There you go. We're talking to you today about your company, leadership, how you started it, et cetera, et cetera, some of your history and get some leadership tips from you as well. Tell us what is the dot for your company? The dot SE, I believe, isn't it? Yeah. Actually, it's just a creative way to spell out our company and the team name and the domain name. We're not in Sweden, so we're actually passing into California. Oh, yeah.

Is SE in Sweden? Yeah, in Sweden. I would have guessed SW, but I'm not good at all these dots. So give us that dot so that people have it and they can find it on the interwebs. So it's realdefen.se. So it's realdefense, the full word, with the dot before the se. .se. And give us a little bit of a bio on you.

What sort of background, other startups you may have been involved in or founded? Tell us more about you. Sure. So we founded Real Defense in 2017. We are institutionally backed leveraged buyout firm. So we focused on buying consumer and privacy companies in North America and Europe. We've raised about $30 million. We've bought four companies. One of the brands that you've probably heard of, have seen or bought or maybe used, it's called Iolo System Mechanic. It's a very popular consumer product on tens of millions of devices around the world.

And prior to that, I was with a company called Anchor Free. We had a very popular VPN product called Hotspot Shield with 650 million users around the world. Wow. Mostly in Europe, some to the United States. And so I have a lot of experience in direct response, have probably acquired over a billion consumers for different ventures that I've been involved with, and have raised a quarter of a billion to half a billion dollars in venture and private equity winning. That's quite a history. Are you guys based in Silicon Valley? No, we're based in Pasadena. Okay. Pasadena. You said that earlier. I should have remembered that. Pasadena. What a great, I grew up in La Cunada and just La Crescenta, you know, over that area and stuff. So pretty cool. And so what is Real Defense as a whole?

How would you describe it as a company? So we have, we're developers. We develop our own code. We also license code. We have consumer privacy products. So it's iVirus to password management, any protection, remote technical support. We have a range of consumer products and services for PCs, Macs, iOS, and Android devices.

And so we're consumer-facing. We do have SMB customers, but we're very similar to McAfee, Norton, companies like that. What made you interested in starting this company and doing what you've done so far? Sure. So there's very, very few options for consumers when it comes to privacy and security. There are not a lot of products out there who are focused on consumers.

There are a lot of products for enterprises, SMBs, but not a lot of products for consumers. And consumers are the most vulnerable in terms of scale. There are more devices that are owned by consumers than there are by enterprises. And so we think it's a great opportunity. We think there's a big gap in the market in terms of product offerings and technologies.

And we have a really good technology platform. We have a lot of developers that have been with us for close to 20 years. And we're very excited about what we're doing. We're growing really quickly and addressing some of these gaps. There you go. And what are some of the companies

that you guys have underneath your umbrella? Sure. So we've got, I would say companies are brands. So our top brand is Iolo. Like I mentioned earlier, we have another brand called Stubzilla, which is a pretty popular product

that was out there probably starting about 20 years ago. MyCleanPC, we have another brand called MyCleanID. You probably have seen these advertised all over the place. Let's see what else. They're all listed on our website. There's about 15 of those. U.S. Tech Support, Warranty Star, Cyber Defender, Get My Drivers, Virus Fix, MyHacked Email. It sounds like a lot of very good security products to help people deal with a lot of their

stuff that they have. My mom and my sister, I don't know where they go on the internet, but they pick up every amount of virus and cookie and pop-up. At one point, I remember years ago, my sister had so many toolbars that she signed up for from different places that it was literally closing off half the screen. And I think we found like 2,000 bugs on her system. Oh, my God. Wow. It was great.

My mom called me the other day and she's like, hey, I'm getting all these pop-ups. You know, what do I do? And, you know, it's just – and a lot of people don't know how to deal with these. So I guess a lot of the companies you have really deal in a lot of the security stuff. Yeah, we understand consumer behavior. And, you know, as much as, you know, we like to be careful online, sometimes we make mistakes. And sometimes it's not a matter of making a mistake. It's a matter of just being exposed to these risks. And so you may be doing everything right, and you can still get a problem. You still have a virus infection, and you can still have a virus infection, and you can still have a problem with your device.

But we're also seeing, besides security problems, there are obvious sort of utility problems, like printer's not working, or Wi-Fi is too slow, IoT device is not connecting to your network. You know, you're trying to sync your phone to your home alarm system and the other way around. And so who do you call? Do you call the device manufacturer or the software developer? In our case, you call us, and we will deal with these issues on your behalf. We'll make sure they work. We'll secure them and monitor them. And so we're like an IT department for your home.

There you go. Well, that's better because when you said who you're going to call, I usually call Ghostbusters for that thing. And I'm like, there's a demon living inside my computer. Can you come over and exercise it? So there you go. So is the flagship of your brand the Iolo? Yes.

And it develops and markets the number one PC magazine rated system mechanic app. Give us more of a dug down on what that does and how it does it. Sure. So, well, a system mechanic is developed in-house. We've built the technology over the past 20 years. And it incorporates privacy tools, a driver, your hard drive optimization capabilities where you can optimize your drive, get rid of files that are slowing you down. We have privacy tools. Basically, in your Windows operating system, there are some features that track your behavior. We allow you to turn those features on and off as you wish.

We also have a feature that allows you to be private when you search. So we have a private search engine called Iolo Safe Search. So it's very similar to DuckDuckGo, if you ever use that. We try to mitigate as much data that you give up when you use the internet without you having to give it up. And so we try to reduce it, but also give you control over that information. So if you do want to give up that information, like let's say you want to give up the geolocation when you're searching on Google, in that instance, maybe you should give it up because the search results will be accurate. But maybe you only want that for that one instance. You don't want to do that all the time. And so we give you those tools. We have an antivirus built in. We also have a password

manager built into the suite. So it's like a Swiss army knife for your computer. It does a lot of things and protects your privacy, protects your device, protects your passwords, and it's inexpensive. You know, we are sold in 20,000 different retail locations around the world, including Staples, Best Buy. We are partnered with every single hardware device manufacturer like Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, so you can buy a product through them. Some of our partners have bundled our product on their devices

when you buy a brand new computer, buy a new laptop. So we're pretty much all over the place. We also license our technology to partners, some of the biggest technology companies in the world that sell antivirus, license our technology. So we've got a pretty good presence around the world. That's pretty awesome. It says over 100 million users worldwide. Yep.

That's quite amazing, man. That's just, that's amazing. There's Stobzilla, MyCleanIdea. Is there any others that you maybe want to touch on? Yeah. You know, they'll have their respective strengths and weaknesses. They're much smaller. All these other brands are much smaller than Iolo. And so over the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to be sort of combining all of these brands under the Iolo umbrella. So it'll just be Iolo brand across the board. We think it's the strongest brand. We think it has the longest reach and makes it easier for consumers to decide which product to buy. And some of these products kind of overlap. They've come to us through acquisitions.

And so it was not designed, it was not by design that we have all these brands. We just acquired a lot of these brands. Yeah. And there's so much stuff that can happen in your computer between all the tracking and the cookies, viruses, anti-malware. You know, it's insane. Yeah, I mean, like I say, my mom and my sister, the amount of stuff they've accumulated on their computers is just crazy.

And then I think my mom just bought a laptop, and she didn't run it through me. So she ended up buying one of these cheap laptops where you don't get the Windows license, but you think you do. But I think all the tracking and probably whoever sold it has some sort of stuff, stuff crap on it, which is probably why she's getting pop-ups all the time. And, and even in Chrome, which is kind of interesting, but yeah, people just don't realize what they're, what they're getting into.

And of course, how, how much they can be compromised. I mean, I have a lot of security and I still end up, you know, having my stuff betrayed on, you know, when, when sites get hacked and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It can be a challenge. Definitely. So what, what was it, what's it like scaling businesses like this? Talk to us a little about the business end of it. What's it like, you know, building a management team, leading this sort of company, taking it from, do you take this company from ground zero to what it is today? No. So what we did is we, we acquired companies that are already profitable and operating. And so we, we used investors capital and our own capital to put together a company basically that just like an acquisition company. And so we acquired these assets.

Our sweet spot in the company is to do restructuring. We optimize expenses. We bring expenses down. Then we optimize revenue by optimizing our customer acquisition costs, average order value, lifetime value, all those key metrics that are relevant. And by doing those things very well, and because we have a good management team and good support,

we're able to have success in our acquisition strategy. There you go. There you go. You know, there's a lot of these different kind of systems on the interwebs. Like if you go to, well, a different place on the internet or you get offered this stuff, you have to worry about what's really behind it. Like I'm trying to think of an antivirus that's out of Russia that everyone

worries about. Talk to us about how safe your products are and stuff like that. Well, the most important thing is our products are made in the United States. You can walk into our office in Pasadena and you'll see developers sending in coding.

It's not coming from Mars or some other place far away. You know, when it comes to the antivirus software, you have to be careful because antivirus software has the deepest connection in your operating system. In other words, it looks at everything that's inside an operating system. That's why it's an antivirus. It has to. If it doesn't, then it's not going to work properly. So it's like giving someone keys to your home. If you don't have access to it.

Sounds like the brand and fiber I take. Yeah. And you have to do that with antivirus companies and you have to give them access. So if you don't trust the source where the code came from don't use the product yeah i mean because you're you're giving them the keys to the store basically right you gave them the keys to the store and that's that's that's that's what it's at it's very simple yeah and i think that's really important for consumers

to do because you know even my mom would be like, or somebody would be like, I downloaded an antivirus thing. You're like, from who? I don't know. It'll pop up on the interweb. That's probably not going to work out. That's probably not going to work out. There's so many like chinese ones and you know i i've i i used to go you know play with stuff i go on download.com and i'd be like let's try this uh mp3 converter or something you know back in the day

and you know then weird stuff starts going on your computer it's going to weird places you're like yeah shut it down you know and it's just there's just so many different ways you can be tracked and everything else what other advice do you have for for people on how to be more secure on the interweb? Well, there's a few things. One is obviously use a trusted antivirus and don't use necessarily free versions of products. There's a huge difference between a free version and a paid version. And a lot of times these antivirus companies don't tell you necessarily what's included in the free version versus a paid version to the extent that it's obvious, right?

So they'll say, oh, you know, we'll do an update, but if it's free, you have to do it yourself or it's once a week. And if it's paid, then it's, you know, real time and that kind of stuff. And for consumers, the best option is just to pay for it. It's not that expensive.

It's under, you know, if it's $40, $50 a year, and it's kind of turn on and let it be. And just keep, keep, keep paying for a subscription.

It's the only thing you got to worry about, but there's a lot more than just viruses. There is hackers that pack your email password, for example. Well, how do you know that? Well, there are services out there that tell you if your email has been hacked. And they go into the dark web. They search for instance of your email. It comes up.

And I will guarantee you that almost any email that's been out there for more than a month has probably been hacked. Wow. Yeah. So you have to be really careful, you know, about password management. It has to do with, you know, how often you change it, what kind of a password you have, make sure it's difficult to crack. Don't use your pet's name and one, two, three, or your birthday or things that are very obvious, you know, use something unique with different characters, you know, count the letters and, you know, numbers and words, letters, and make it difficult for people

to guess. And then track it to see if the password comes up in the world, you know, out there on the dark web, whether or not someone's actually got a, you know, username and password from one of your websites you visit. So for example, let's say you use an online storage service and that online storage got hacked into, or you play a video game and that video game system got broken into. They took your password and username and now they have access to that account.

But not just that account, any account that uses that username and password, that email account. Yeah. So you mean, I think that, you know, these people are, they're hackers, right? So they'll go out and write a program that goes out to all top websites, including bank accounts, including brokerage accounts, and will automatically populate those accounts with that username and password to see if it can go through.

Wow. And that's why people get hacked. Yeah. I've seen that happen where I get notifications saying, you know, someone's trying to break in your account. They're using an old password they found on one of these sites. There's the, I forget the name of the one site where it like lets you know if your emails come up. So I ran the IOLO software on my computer and downloaded the trial. It found 35,941 issues, 400 system recommendations.

Looks like I got a lot of internet junk files, Windows junk files, registry issues. It also says that I have some issues I should see a psychiatrist about. No, it doesn't say that, but it probably should. And it recommends that I hire the exorcist to the power of Christ compels you. I'm going to have to get some holy water, I guess, and throw it on the computer. I'm just kidding, folks. Don't do that. That's one feature I forgot to mention. Is that the upgrade? I've been known to probably do that from time to time. I feel like I should do that.

The power of grace, you know, throw holy water on the old computer there. But, you know, I mean, you make a good point. That's why I always use the password that's on my luggage, 12345. That's a joke, by the way. I don't do that. So 35,000 issues, 941 on my computer. Holy crap. I thought I was being good, and I'm not, clearly.

Well, if you use your computer often, like you probably use your computer all the time for doing your shows and doing research. Every time you go to a website, every time you click on an image, every time you do anything online, there's a trace of that. And so that information gets

stored, it gets stored in your computer, it gets stored in the cloud, and it creates a record. And so that information gets stored, it gets stored in your computer, it gets stored in the cloud, and it creates a record. And so when we do an analysis of the device, depending what type of analysis you ran, but assuming you ran the whole drive, if you have a large hard drive, and like I said, you use a computer often, there's going to be a lot of items that are going to be found. Now, it doesn't mean that you're compromised. It doesn't mean that you've been hacked. It doesn't mean that your computer is going to break down. It just means that there's files there that should be removed or can be removed to create a more optimal experience. So temporary files, certain registry files that may slow down your device, files that

are just eating up your disk space. And so if your disk space is already low and you're adding more files to it, your computer is going to be noticeably slower because software needs that memory, needs that extra disk space to run. And so you'll see a degradation. You're also going to see degradation in your internet connectivity. You're going to see degradation in your browsers, your browsers, open up Windows and how content is rendered. So if you're a gamer, you certainly need this because you're

constantly going to be tying up your bandwidth, you're tying up your CPU speed. So these are the types of tools you should be using. Yeah, I'm a very big gamer. In fact, there was one of my games, my favorite game is Destiny. They started having a thing where people could ping your ip address and

d-dosh you through the text chat in the game like really crazy yeah it's just it's like insane what they can do you know you think you're gaming you're like well i'm kind of in a closed off environment and probably safe from hackers or weird people but no no you know that's kind of weird anything more we want to touch on about you guys and how you do it? Well, like I said, we're growing. We're seeing during the pandemic, a lot of consumers went out and bought new devices. Oh, yeah. Not just computers, but cameras, but printers, about cables and what have you.

And so now all those devices are being utilized. Consumers are working from home. They're going to school from home. That trend hasn't really changed. I mean, we're going back to work, going back to the office, but a lot of people are not. And so that created a big demand for what we do and we're hiring people. So if you're a developer, you're a marketer, please check our website. We're looking to hire people. The other thing too I'd say is there's more kids probably online now than ever before

because they're online doing the Zoom schooling. Yeah. Everybody's online now at the house. I remember when the pandemic started, watching my friends. They had to set up the kids on the computers. I mean, I thought my mom and sister were bad, but I can't imagine what kids click on that gets them into some ugly parts of the web or downloads, you know, God knows what virus and et cetera, et cetera. They're like, oh, it's a cute picture and click it.

And, you know, so there seen sometimes where I'll monitor our home network and we'll see, you know, points that are bleeding out for some reason, sending lots of traffic back to probably China or wherever they send their data. And you're like, wow, okay, that's eating up a lot of data. What's going on over there? We need to shut that down or something. So even IoT isn't as secure as people think it is for some of the different things that are going on in your home. Well, yeah, actually, we have a feature coming out, a product. isn't as secure as people think it is for some of the different things that are going on in your home. Well, yeah, actually, we have a feature coming out, a product. Well, part of it is already there, but the new version is going to have a more improved experience where we tell you what devices are connected to your network.

We don't actually tell you how to deal with them. And so make it more actionable. But you're absolutely correct. In a typical household in the United States right now, there's about nine to 10 devices connected to the internet. That's significantly more than what was there about 10 years ago. 10 years ago, about two devices. And now, significantly more.

And so, enough kids are actually a lot more sophisticated nowadays than they were 50, 20 years ago because they are growing up with this stuff. If you're a two-year or three-year-old and you are growing up in today's household, well, you're only going to see tech, right? You're not going to see anything else. And so by the time you're 10 years old, you already learned how to use text apps and how to download videos and games.

And so they're very sophisticated and they know the difference between bad things and good things. They're educated from their parents or all that to the schools and what have you. And so the big fear is things you can't see, right? So like you said, IoT devices. So if you bring a device home, you connect it, let's say it's a camera or an alarm system, what have you,

and that system gets hacked into, but not your computer or your phone. And then that system is now seeing what you're doing, right? And so that's very hard to monitor, hard to control. And so we have some technology that we're working on that will help you sort of mitigate these types of risks. But it is a big problem. And it's not, and that's everywhere.

It's not just in your house, it's in the car, it's in the, you know, street lights and anything that's connected to the internet is potentially a risk. It's just, it's crazy, you know, everyone's like the internet dream of like everything, the internet's everywhere. And then you're just like, well, that's just access

points everywhere. Right. Just entry points where people can come in. Well, this has been pretty insightful. I'll test out the software and play with it. Does anything more we want to touch on

before we go out? Well, just, you know, basic tips. You know, if it's too good to be true, don't click on it. If you get an email from your bank,

make sure it's from your bank. Look at the URL. Look at the email that's coming from. If it looks suspicious, it probably is. Don't click on it. If the bank says your password has been changed or call the bank, don't respond to the email, just call the bank and talk to them on the phone. And so double verify, triple verify

information. That's the best way to be safe. Yeah, that's definitely true. There's a new texting thing they do where they'll send you texts and they'll be like, you know, your PayPal has been hacked or your bank has been hacked. Click this link. You get the emails that say click the link. I never click through a link. I mean, I just don't click through a link. If somebody sends me a click through link, I'm like, I'm not touching that. I don't know what that is unless I can see the URL and sense it.

I'm not. I'm not going I'm not just talking to click it. If my bank sends me a message, I don't click the link. I go, I type in the URL and, and you know, that's, that's the best way to do it. I mean, I've seen, I've seen some really good fake emails where they're really good. It looks like your bank email and, and you, you click on something and you give me your password and stuff and they have an entry point. It's really crazy. And it just seems to be getting more and more abundant,

the amount of viruses and hacks and people that want to do evil things with you and your money. Well, because you can do it remotely. And if you think about the crime, the crime doesn't have a victim necessarily. No one gets really hurt, physically hurt, right? So if you're a criminal or want to be a criminal, this is a crime of choice because it's the most rewarding, the least, you know, likely to get caught and nothing, no one gets hurt

physically, right? So there's going to be a lot more of this crime. But I would say that if you could do basics like double, triple, you know, verification of your data, your credentials, use your phone number as a way to verify identity, verify access. If you get an email from any financial institution that you use, whether it's a brokerage account, bank account, and it's asking you to take action, like fill out a form or to click on a link, before you do it, verify that it's from the source and or call them directly. Don't rely on one source of communication. Call them. It takes a little extra time.

It's inconvenient. But look, they steal your money. It's going to be very inconvenient to get it back. Yeah. So think about that. Definitely. I mean, especially if it's Bitcoin or some sort of crypto,

that stuff's been crazy these days. You know, two-factor identification is sometimes a pain, but it's sometimes so important, whether it's a text ID or whether you use an app like Authy or some other thing. It makes all the difference in the world. I mean, my GoDaddy, I think, is protected by two different entry points. There's two-factor and then there's like a code that we use. Right. And yeah, when I call them,

it's a pain in the butt to have to go through the codes. But, you know, I think of all the things that we could lose if, if someone got through there and, you know, figured out my code was one, two,

three, four, five, my same as my luggage. I love that joke. I don't know why it's a funny movie. Spaceballs. Anyway,

anything more you want to tease out before we go? I think I, I didn't talk for hours about this, so don't get me started. There you go. I think I've given you the highlights. There you go. Check out the brands they have on their website. Give us the.se again. It's realdefen.se.

That's a corporate site. And for products, for brand that we promote the most, it's IOLO, I-O-L-E. That's the corporate site. And for products, for brand that we promote the most, it's Iolo. I-O-L-O dot com. There you go. There you go. Thanks for being on the show. We really appreciate it, Gary. Thank you, Chris. Good to have me. Thank you. Good to have you and good

to have me. Good to have all of us. All of us are all still here. That's always a good thing. Thanks, Monit, for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Go's always a good thing. Thanks a lot for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Go to goodreads.com, ForgeSense, ChrisFoss, YouTube.com ForgeSense, ChrisFoss. All the places the crazy kids are playing on the interwebs, that's where the ChrisFoss

show is, or not. One of those two. It's not on Snapchat, let's put it that way. For the most obvious of reasons. It's a good joke. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you, and we'll see you guys next time.