· Web viewThis transcript was exported on Dec 10, 2020 - view latest version here. akshay...

This transcript was exported on Dec 10, 2020 - view latest version here .

bill murphy: Akshay, I want to welcome you to the show today.

akshay bhargava: Thank you so much, Bill. It's a pleasure to be here.

bill murphy: I'm thrilled to have you on because you've been in the technology industry for a long time. And the company you're currently with Malwarebytes has been one of the early technologies [00:00:30] that we were involved in, but before we talk about Malwarebytes, I really want to hear about from you about your story of success, because we can take it back as far as you'd like. I was just looking at, maybe you can talk about where you started and how, what got you to this point today.

akshay bhargava: Would love to. So my background is I'm a computer scientist by training. I did my undergrad in computer science. And then I spent [00:01:00] a number of years as a software developer and engineering manager. And then I was fortunate enough to go to business school. And what sparked my interest in business school is really a passion for understanding more about the customer and the business and economics of technology. In business school, I was fortunate to go to MIT Sloan, which is a school that I really admire. Because not only this is my alma mater, but also because of the principles that it stands behind.

And it really wants to build leaders that [00:01:30] are humble, that are hungry, and that want to have positive impact in the world. So while I was at MIT, I happen to stumble in two areas. One is entrepreneurship. And the other is I had an internship at McKinsey and Company, where I got a chance to do management consulting, and meet some phenomenal executives. And this is really where my passion for cloud and cybersecurity started, was at MIT and at [00:02:00] McKinsey.

While I was at McKinsey, I would talk to a lot of boards and CEOs, and two topics kept coming up. Number one, what is this cloud thing? And how should we take advantage of it? And number two, why are these attackers actors? And what do I need to do to protect myself in my company and organization from that? It became kind of a natural theme I kept hearing. It was one that I started to develop some expertise in, because I started advising customers on this, [00:02:30] and clients on this topic. From there my journey as a product leader-

bill murphy: Can I ask you a questioned about MIT?

akshay bhargava: Of course.

bill murphy: You won a big competition there, you won $100,000 competition? Or maybe I'd love for you to tell that story.

akshay bhargava: Oh, yes, this was actually one of the highlights of my time at MIT. There's a famous competition called the MIT 100K. And it's an entrepreneurship

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competition, where it's not limited to people from MIT, is a [00:03:00] global competition. But MIT hosted and also provides awards. But in that competition, I was fortunate to be part of a team. And that team, we proposed a company called Cyber Analytics, which was really focused on addressing EPTS, advanced persistent threats, and utilizing an innovative technology from one of the labs that MIT had licensed to. So this [00:03:30] was a business model around this really compelling technology called attack graphs, and how we can use it to detect and prevent PPTs. So we submitted this idea into the 100K, my team, there's five of us total on the team. And we won the web/IT trap for this submission. So yes, it was a great experience.

bill murphy: That's quite impressive. Probably from the Boston area. And of course [00:04:00] MIT is well known. I found that fun to read about on your students from research about you and then up, but I don't want to get in the way of your good story. So then what happened next after MIT was that, where are you going next?

akshay bhargava: MIT, I landed at McKinsey. And McKinsey, I was consulting with a lot of Fortune 1000 companies, from an IT perspective, and also a lot of technology companies serving the CEO and board. And two themes kept coming up, cloud [00:04:30] and cybersecurity. I started building some expertise in that and from there, it became a logical extension for my career when I decided to leave McKinsey for personal reasons, largely because the travel was becoming quite excessive. I decided to go and work for a company called FireEye. FireEye as a company in the cybersecurity space. I joined them pre IPO there about 350 people at the time, and it was a terrific run the company IPO and [00:05:00] I was responsible for one product and eventually for 10 of them through organic and inorganic growth. It was really a phenomenal rocket ship. That was a great experience. And that led me to Oracle, where I worked in the Oracle Cloud business group as an executive. And then from there, I went to Malwarebytes, where I'm currently the Chief Product officer.

bill murphy: Did you ever get a chance to meet Larry Ellison?

akshay bhargava: I have met Larry Ellison. [00:05:30] And I've been in meetings with him. Yes, that's an experience in itself.

bill murphy: You won a robot competition in Carnegie Mellon? Can you tell that story?

akshay bhargava: Yeah, that dates me back that was in my undergrad. That was my first time in winning something. So yes, it still held a very special place in my heart. The thing is, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, the reason I chose to go to Carnegie Mellon [00:06:00] is I did all of these different tours of universities. And when I went to Carnegie Mellon, and I walked in Wien Hall, I saw these robots walking around. And for some reason I just said, "This just feels like home. I love this place. I love robots. I love computer science." Had this Mystique to it. By no means is the


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building beautiful I'm is a pretty dingy old, rundown building, but at least when I was there, I'm sure it's much better now.

[00:06:30] But the glamor of all this, you're just surrounded with this tech. And so as I saw these really advanced robotics, there was a robot competition. It was a pretty well defined robot competition where, robots would race and they had to do certain things. And so we designed a small mini robot that had to maneuver through a race and compete and try to win and get to the other side. My partner and I, we create a robot, and we're [00:07:00] lucky that we stopped by and won that thing,

bill murphy: I love that. It stuck out for me, because I've been going to Singularity University for many years. I think I got involved really, in 2015. And they send executives out to, it's right in the Bay Area. And, and so they run groups of executives through this exposure to all these exponential technologies. And of course as an executive, you're not always touching outside of your [00:07:30] own domains of technologies, like in health care, robotics, or AI, or space travel. So you get exposed to all this in and the robot, they had a robot competition. We had to build as a team, these robot, and I'm not a scientist or any of that, but it was fun, it was a lot of fun doing it.

akshay bhargava: We had a lot of fun. We had a big group of people cheering over there. And the robots would collide, and all kinds of interesting things happen. [00:08:00] It was definitely more than the award, the experience of just being part of that was something very memorable.

bill murphy: Now, at what are your thoughts on from oracle, Since you have some understanding of Oracle, and I think they're like, the sleeping, not a sleeping giant, that’s probably not the right word, They're already a giant, but their cloud their pass, and their IAS product lines that you were involved in. It was super interesting to me to see TikTok. [00:08:30] That was the that was the platform that was approved. So there's something going on there. And I don't know what it is, because we're more in the Microsoft AWS side of the fence. What are your thoughts on that, why Oracle's chosen?

akshay bhargava: There are two things, I think, one is, Oracle, given how big the opportunity of cloud is, if you're a big tech company, you cannot afford not to be in that state. It's in some sense, it is table [00:09:00] stakes, like a big company like Oracle or SAP, if they want to stay relevant in the next phase of technology, they need to have a strong presence in cloud. So I think that's number one. Is just looking at the market trends looking at the economics. Now Oracle's take to cloud, at least while I was there, was going to, they didn't want to be a differentiated player, not just me too. And a big part of the push there was really how [00:09:30] they're building up their infrastructure as a service, the bare metal offerings, combined with the fact that they have a very strong software as a service layer.


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Their idea of cloud was very much to be holistic infrastructure as a service platform as a service data, as a service, which they're very good at with the database origin and software as a service, all integrated. And the second thing that they wanted to do was also help customers manage on prem and cloud. [00:10:00] And the management and security of this hybrid environment, multi cloud hybrid environment was something that Oracle believes that they can accelerate. Having a complete cloud stack plus security management to help with the hybrid multi cloud deployment was the angle that Oracle was taking.

And given their customer base, that made a lot of sense. Because many of their customers are not the first adopters to cloud, they're really trying to find a way to move [00:10:30] from on prem to cloud. And Oracle could be, is very well positioned to be a partner to that for them to help them do that.

bill murphy: You put a very significant business line to get there, while you were there.

akshay bhargava: That's right. So my role there was twofold. One is to create a business line. But the other was to help differentiate Oracle Cloud from the competition. And really, the differentiation came from the completeness software as a service all the way [00:11:00] to the infrastructure, the service, and the security management. So the business lines that I created, were also in security management. It was both a differentiator for Oracle Cloud as a whole, but also an opportunity to launch the first cloud services for security and management. These included some things like Oracle's identity as a service offering, we also had an offering called identity sock. As for security operation centers, that tied together identity, [00:11:30] cloud access security broker, data security, all of the things together, and management and Sim. That was really some of the work that I did. And we did grow that to be in one of the fastest growth areas within platform as a service for Oracle.

bill murphy: That's fascinating. That's wonderful. Then now you're at Malwarebytes, I think probably the question is, what are you not in charge of? Not what are you in charge of? [00:12:00] Maybe a lot of people know, Malwarebytes. But maybe we can talk about what your role is there. And then I have a couple of questions for you.

akshay bhargava: Yeah, absolutely. I'm the Chief Product officer at Malwarebytes. And it's such an honor, because I get to work on something that I'm so passionate about, which is products and innovation. And so in that role, I'm responsible for a couple of things. Number one, is defining what are the products we want to build? So the product strategy, making sure that [00:12:30] we execute and deliver those products. Also, how do we price and package those products? How do we take them to market? And then the third piece, I would say, is a lot of the, by the way, I should say, part of building the products are key differentiation is our design. How we design our products to be uniquely differentiated in the market is another aspect. And then how do we take those products to market. A lot of the things that go to market aspects of that [00:13:00] are also things that I look


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after in the operational elements to make sure we succeed in the market. That's in a nutshell, all the things looking at products [inaudible 00:13:08].

bill murphy: It's fantastic. I've had the product officer and I don't think, necessarily, and I've been a little bit of an eye opener to see how powerful the product offices are within software companies. Unless you're in the Bay Area, or know that industry really well, that Sonic walls, product officers on in several. And what [00:13:30] I really wanted to ask you is because the innovation required for security these days is quite stunning. It's like trying to change the tires in a moving car. It's a challenge. And I love to, maybe we could talk about met your framework for how you go about doing that, in a fairly complex world, how you break it in and organize teams towards an objective?

akshay bhargava: Great question. One of the things that when I look at [00:14:00] innovation, and then part of the reason I've built something that I call the purpose built innovation framework, is because I've noticed that innovation is something that a lot of companies struggle to make repeatable. Sometimes companies have one product success. And they mistake that, I don't know how many listeners have read this book, Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, a terrific book, highly recommended about behavioral psychology. But some of those [00:14:30] aspects apply also to products and innovation. And a lot of successful products, they mistake the role that skill and luck might play in developing those products. And this is something that's a passion of mine is because I want to build innovative products. But I also want to make sure that they're successful every time.

And you need to extract out the element of luck from skill in making this repeatable. That's one of the areas that's a passion of mine. [00:15:00] Going back to your question Bill is, as part of that framework, you need to think about not only what are the steps that are needed, but also how do you organize a team? How do you structure the processes? How do you make sure that you get, deeply understand the customers, pain points and problems, because that's really where I think a lot of the innovation starts from. All of those aspects are things that I've tried to encompass in my framework.

bill murphy: I've never heard you talk about that way of [00:15:30] breaking out skill and luck out of it. Would one way to break apart skill and luck is to have more tests. You're testing more frequently and spending less money on before you go fully to market?

akshay bhargava: That's absolutely one of the aspects of it.

bill murphy: Okay.

akshay bhargava: In what I typically call experimentation. But it's this, in order to have a very strong innovation culture and capability, you need to have the ability to [00:16:00] test rapidly, fail first, iterate. And that's part of the mechanism where


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by the time you put into the product pipeline, you have a high confidence, and its ability to succeed. That's definitely part of the framework.

bill murphy: Is the high confidence in the success is can you make a security product that you know, works, but still is not accepted by the customer? Because maybe they don't realize the value of it? [00:16:30] You can be six, I'm just wondering how you would approach a successful product. But the customers doesn't know that they don't, like APTs. You mentioned APTs earlier. APT was a topic, I remember leaving RSA one year. And the market I'm in is like, 100 to 5000 users. It's like, mid market. As you know, RSA is just all the big boys, big fortune 100. They're all talking about [00:17:00] APT's, but then I come back to talk about APTs, and I might as well be clanging a gong in the middle of the pandemic in a shopping mall. Nobody's listening. How do you avoid that effect of nobody's listening? But you know, it's the right security approach.

akshay bhargava: Yeah, and this is where, I'll cite a reference here. And by the way, I love reading, so I get a lot of inspiration from what I read. A great analogy to this is, for those of you who may have heard of the book, The Infinite Game by Simon [00:17:30] Sinek. In that way, he talks a lot about, what's your purpose as an organization? And do you understand the timeframe of the game you're playing. If you're playing an infinite game, where your purpose is to help customers, address the most relevant and impactful threats. Then, that guides your purpose in what you need to do. And eventually you find the right way to market and tell the story, but your purpose guides you [00:18:00] to that.

I think even for me when I was working on APTs, at FireEye a lot of customers will say, "APTs, that's for the big companies, that's not for us. Why would someone want to target us as APTs. But I think when you have a very clear sense of purpose, that we want to protect you from the most impactful, most modern threats, then people start to understand, "Okay, why, what are these APT's? And [00:18:30] why should I care, and you can start finding the right ways to relate to them. And I can give you so many great examples. Of course, analogies also helped once attacks happened, customers could understand having the threat intelligence helps. But being able to weave that really compelling story, why you should care as a customer is really the difference between this thing APT versus let me tell you a story about why you should care.

bill murphy: Pause [00:19:00] that for one second. Your book guide and I know that and so we were talking about libraries. This book 'Range', have you read it?

akshay bhargava: I have not read it. It's on my list.

bill murphy: Okay. But he talks about the power. It's how generalists triumph in a specialized world, in breadth, how breadth is going to win and not just narrow deep dives, but trying to find patterns across. [00:19:30] But he talks about analogies. And so your point about analogies and storytelling makes quite a bit of sense. But


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what I haven't heard before, which I thought was really cool, as you just mentioned about purpose. Your storytelling, really around the purpose, not trying to chase everything that's happening.

akshay bhargava: And you know, the thing I love, by the way Range, I just want to talk about that for a second because I did look, I haven't read the book, but I did listen to the podcast with the author. And my biggest takeaway from that was the way I want to raise my child is very [00:20:00] different. Just listening to that podcast because he uses the example of athletes, and how athletes who do tremendously well in a certain sport, many of them actually come from having played many sports. And this also ties to innovation. You learn different skill sets in different contexts, which when you apply it in a different context or a different sport, you become [00:20:30] innovative in that sport, you become distinctive in that sport.

bill murphy: Sure

akshay bhargava: The same thing applies to, industry, verticals, customer segments, and applying innovation from one segment to another. One trend in particular I talked about in cybersecurity, though, is what I call consumerization of IT. And because I have such a passion for design, we have designed consumer products that are very easy to use, very elegant, very slick. [00:21:00] And what we found is a lot of people said, "Hey, customers in the enterprise," they don't care about ease of use, they don't care about compelling UI, and all of the other things that the consumer cares about.

Actually, those pundits in the past they were wrong. Because what I'm finding is, customers do care about ease of use, ease of search, ease of ability to correlate things really rapidly. And so that's an example of applying Range in cyber security and at Malwarebytes.

bill murphy: [00:21:30] Also, I got connected by this really unique article, you wrote about the Zen of cybersecurity, and I'm not getting the title 100% correct. But that, to me, being a longtime mindfulness and practitioner in meditator, I thought. I talk a lot about the 80-20 principle and pareto's principle, and my CTO, we tried hack to get people to focus on the [00:22:00] critical 20% instead of trying to boil the ocean. And so it's really interesting your approach, because it is super complex. And if you're in the product side, and you're trying to design innovation, but with the simplicity and design, aesthetics in mind and ease of use, that's very different than adding complexity on top of complexity.

akshay bhargava: Correct. This is a topic I also practice meditation. So the topic [00:22:30] that I really resonated with, is reaching Zen and cyber security. And if you take a step back, one of the things I hear from so many of security professionals, today is they're inundated with alerts. There's no shortage of alerts to look at. So they have so much. And there's no shortage of tools, they're inundated with more and more growing number of tools, and more and more management console.


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And it also reminded me of the behavioral psychology that we learned. Is one of the things that's [00:23:00] a well known fact is, people when you multitask, you're actually not more productive. But in the mind, it feels like you're more productive, because every time you finish something or accomplish something, put a check mark, it releases dopamine in the body. And that's a feelgood factor. Even though sometimes you multitask, you might not be as productive, but you may feel like you're more productive. And there's science behind this. And one of the things that I realized is in [00:23:30] cybersecurity, it's very easy to just say, "I'm going to look at these hundreds of alerts." Whereas, having a Zen approach to it is actually being much more mindful and being more purposeful, and picking the right alerts to look at and really focusing on those, and how to reduce your attack surface also> Rather than just have a really big attack surface, and keep looking at alerts and cloud versus my firewall roles versus this versus [00:24:00] that. That's really what inspired me to write about this topic.

bill murphy: The vendors over the past seven years have really, it's been an arms race. And I think now we're taking a step back, or at least I hope, we're also taking step back and looking, okay, we've got enough stuff now we got to pull it back together and come up with something that human beings can really operate and we can leverage these helper technologies, like AI and machine [00:24:30] learning, to really help us instead of making it the system's unusable because they're too confused.

akshay bhargava: You're spot on.

bill murphy: As far as what you're designing for back to your framework, approach, when you take a step back and you look at the market, and your purpose within your organization in your team's purpose. How are you organizing [00:25:00] for the future, how does your framework guide you right now?

akshay bhargava: I think the first thing where the framework helps a guide, is, I don't listen to feature requests. I always try number one, and this is a golden rule that I train all of our product managers on is, if somebody comes, it's very easy for sales, or a customer, or even the board to say, "Hey, I'll tell you what, here's a feature you should build," that [00:25:30] shows a lack of understanding of the most important thing. And for me, the most important thing is step it back to the customer.

bill murphy: Okay.

akshay bhargava: The customer has a problem, the customer has a pain point. And so you need to go and empathize not with the feature, but you to empathize with the customer, and understand what is the customer's pain point. Only, then you will be able to know whether that feature is the best way to solve that pain point. If you're starting with the feature, [00:26:00] you'll never be able to be truly innovative, because to be truly innovative, and the master of this is I think Steve


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Job was a natural, because he would say, "I can understand the customer pain points so well that I can articulate it better than even the customer can."

But this is what true customer empathy is, when you can deeply understand the customer's situation, the customer's problem, then you're not limited by a single feature that a competitor [00:26:30] would, or a single feature that someone can pick up. Now you can experiment many different ways to find the optimal way to solve that customer problem. That's really where I start the framework. And I call this customer empathy. Because it is really being able to put yourself in the customer shoes, a great product manager has to be able to do that.

bill murphy: How do you organize this through thousands and thousands of customers? How would you start [00:27:00] gathering the data points?

akshay bhargava: Yes. By the way, doing this, there's no one answer to this, because based on the vertical, based on the segment, this approach has to be nuanced. For example, if you're building a product for consumers, it's pretty hard to sit with millions of consumers. It's just not practical and your target customer base is that if you're serving customers in the fortune 500, [00:27:30] it's easier to talk to a handful of customers and start to get a viewpoint of what those customers care about.

Understanding the segment and understand the vertical is also important strategy needs to be nuanced for them. But let me give you some concrete examples of things we're doing that help across various segments. With consumers, one of the things that we find really impactful is, doing experimentation, AV testing and surveys. [00:28:00] Those type of tools work really well, when you have a larger population of customers. In the large enterprise, having customer advisory boards, having a lot more one on one discussions and identifying who are the thought leaders in those spaces, is a very effective way to deeply empathize with customers. And doing shadow programs right along with a few of those big customers helps a lot.

[00:28:30] Those are just examples. But fundamentally, I always try to balance the approach with both quantitative and qualitative insights. Quantitative insights can come through surveys and other things where you can pull a large group of customers or prospects. And then qualitative insights come from talking to a handful of customers in that segment, or users in that segment, and understanding really the why, [00:29:00] behind some of the things you learn in your service.

bill murphy: Okay, and then knowing a little bit about Job, I know you do, as well, when he came in, didn't he can like 80% of the products. He just said, "No, we're not using these products anymore, and just focus on a couple." Is that even possible for working at a company to come in today and do that?


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akshay bhargava: I think it is challenging to do, but maybe it's the right thing that a lot of companies need to do. [00:29:30] I remember this story about Andy Grove at Intel, and they're debating about whether you should get rid of something or double down on something. And his response was what, if you and I were not at this company, and we're coming in brand new day one, what would we do? Will we create something new? Or we kill something, and the person he was talking to, I think is the chief architect said, "Undo that. [00:30:00] We would do this." He said, "Okay, I have an idea. Let's go downstairs," takes him outside and said, "We're walking in new now, we're the new guys. And now let's go make that decision." And this is part of the thing that makes this decision making tough is that, it's very hard to, there's always some customers that say, "Hey, this product is good enough," there's always some champions in the company who like that product. So it's hard to rationalize a product portfolio.

bill murphy: Yeah.

akshay bhargava: [00:30:30] Even at Malwarebytes, we've made that tough decision to kill the product. And it's the right thing for the company. It's the right thing for the customers in the long term. But in the short term, it creates some pain. And this is why to do it effectively, you need someone who is truly a visionary who can see the long term and help bring customers to long term and reduce short term pain.

bill murphy: That's your point. And by the way, I have a another, you just asked a great question. This is one of my favorite books questions [00:31:00] are the answer. It's funny, because you just ask, and with innovation, it's sometimes the most powerful question is, more than it's the right answer, is are we asking ourselves the right questions?

akshay bhargava: Totally. And I think as I've matured in my career, and now that as an executive, the most important value that I think I can add to the company and organizations, make sure [00:31:30] that we're asking the right questions. And so this is fundamental, do we deeply, and I think also starting with why, and understanding why as a really powerful question. I think those are two things where often we pass these points is very easy. Even going back to the customer empathy example, it's very easy to say we should build this feature. Without asking why.

Sometimes the answer you get to the why is not good [00:32:00] enough. Why? Because competitor does this. Why? Because the salesperson said we should do it. Why? Because this customer said, "Still not good enough." Tell me the customer pain point, then that's a good why for me. If you tell me customers have this pain point. And I believe that the optimal way to solve that pain point is this feature. Then I say, "Okay, now that makes sense to me." But until I don't understand, that correlation going back all the way to the [00:32:30] customer, the answer is not good enough.


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bill murphy: I'm so intrigued with your purpose statement before. And how does purpose guide your that last statement you just made about a feature request, or a customer pain point. Because I'm looking at those as two separate things. And then how would the purpose line up with that in your mind?

akshay bhargava: Yeah, it's a great question. Finding purposes, is one of those things that elevates beyond a product. [00:33:00] Product, you can say customer pain point, let's build it in the product as a way to solve it. Purpose is a level above. Purpose really needs to be at a company level. It trickles down into every employee, into every product decision and a lot of other things. But purpose has to be at a higher level. And so purposes, why do we exist? Why do we come to work every day? If the answer is we come to work every day to build products, [00:33:30] that's not the real purpose.

There needs to be a deeper purpose. And for me at Malwarebytes, why do we come to work every day at Malwarebytes. Because we view a world that's free of malware. And that's where we can make sure that whether you're a consumer, whether you're a company, the stress and having to think about threats, we can take that away from you. That's our purpose, is to give you [00:34:00] the ability to be and the freedom to not have to think about cyber threats.

bill murphy: With and purpose field, be synonymous with vision or synonymous with mission?

akshay bhargava: Great. Purpose is actually the core that drives both of those. We have a purpose. And you have a vision of what the future will look like. It's usually informed by your [00:34:30] purpose, and then mission becomes the vehicle of how you get it. Purpose, vision, mission, they all tie in very closely together. It's like two legs of the same school.

bill murphy: These are interesting conversations, because in the innovation world that people talk about MTPS like a massive transformative purpose and vision and someone said, "A vision is possibly unachievable in this lifetime." [00:35:00] Meaning that it's a horizon that keeps moving. You never achieve it because it's aspirational. It's a verb or it's a moving target, but it's aspirational. And so I was super curious on how you laid in purpose because I get it, but it makes sense the way you explained it.

akshay bhargava: Good. And I think yes, sometimes vision, mission purpose, can sometimes be overloaded term, meaning people might imply different things [00:35:30] by them, by just using those terms. It is always good to clearly define what you mean by each of those terms. Yes, I agree.

bill murphy: So you're certainly a master of complexity of understanding complexity, but then designing to reduce and help customers with this complex world. Because if you can, essentially, what I'm very interested these days is as businesses start


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to use on prem [00:36:00] cloud, hybrid cloud, multi cloud, whatever hosting facilities. They've got a lot of choices, and many people are sprawled. And so by definition, that's complexity. And how do you look at that, and now as a security company, you're designing products for multiple contingencies. And then multiple plants, how do you approach that from your perspective and how do you design for the future with that [00:36:30] reality?

akshay bhargava: Yes, and I think this goes back, going back to my innovation prime, because it ties in very nicely with something I talked about, which is prioritization. Because at some point, the good news is, for most companies, and Malwarebytes, be no exception here. The number of ideas, the number of things you can do is unbounded, there's always more things you can do than you have time to do. A critical part of the success [00:37:00] of your, whether it's your security approach, whether it's your product strategy, is what you choose to do.

And increasingly, what you choose not to do, because oftentimes, there's more things you choose not to do, than things you choose to do, just because of the sheer volume of things. This is where once you understand purpose, and mission, vision, once you understand your North star, then it becomes much easier to help drive how to prioritize [00:37:30] things to do. And this is something that even at Malwarebytes we do a very effective job. We say, "Hey, what are the set of things that are core to us that we need to build? What are things that we ca partner, what are the things we can buy?" And so defining very clearly, what are the things that we need to build, because they're so core, to our purpose and to our vision, that helps inform the priority.

And there's other aspects of how you prioritize things. For us, looking at ROI [00:38:00] is another thing. At the end of the day, we are a corporation, so optimizing for our stakeholders, optimizing for revenue growth and customer pain points, all of those things come into the mix. All the stakeholders, the lining with the North Star, what the return on investment could be for this idea, all those things come into this magic box, you shake it, and then you get a prioritization of things you need to do.

bill murphy: [00:38:30] It really does become for an 80-20 analysis of what the 20% of these ideas metaphorically speaking, that we're going to build ourselves, partner or buy our way in.

akshay bhargava: Yeah. And I think the 80-20 graders, absolutely right here is, at a order of magnitude, you're going to have 100 ideas of which you're only going to have the capacity to do on the order of 20. That prioritization, but at [00:39:00] the same time, those 20% of ideas, if you pick the right ones should deliver even more than 80% of the potential impact. So that's really why I think the using the credo analogy is a good one here.

bill murphy: I know you're a fan of Nassim Taleb's book, 'Antifragile' and you've written about it I know in dark reading and then you mentioned it on a list of executive


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books you like. For those who don't know, the book, Antifragile, how does that influencing [00:39:30] some of the work you're doing now?

akshay bhargava: And I think, especially for the security purpose, I really encourage them to look at this book, Antifragile. The thing is, the premise of the book is simple in a way. Is that look, we always think about what's the opposite of delicate is something that's strong. If you ship something and you say, "Hey, it's delicate." In [00:40:00] turbulence, it'll break. But if you ship it, what's the opposite of that?

The opposite that most people think is if you ship something, and has a lot of turbulence, it doesn't break. But doesn't break and breaks are not opposites. Actually, the opposite is in that it doesn't break, it actually becomes stronger. You put in turbulence and they become stronger. And that is really the concept of Antifragile, is when you put it into turbulence, whatever it is that you put, [00:40:30] it comes out stronger.

Now people say, "Okay, what are analogies with this?" The good news is, we're surrounded with analogies of anti fragility. And the human body is a great example, nature is a great example. For example, for any of those people out there who like to do strength training, lift weights, what happens is, on one day, you can lift 30 pounds, and you kind of that's your max, the next day you can do 35. [00:41:00] And the same person who used to only be able to lift 30 pounds, one day can lift 150 pounds. He could not lift 250 pounds the first day they started.

This is an example where the body, the human body is anti fragile. Your price stress to it and become stronger over time. How do we apply these concepts to cybersecurity, and that's really what I talked about in my dark reading article, Failing Towards Zero, which is [00:41:30] a lot of times people think, "Hey, we had a cyber attack, or we had a data breach, or we had something," that must have made us weaker and then that compromised our security posture. But having lots of small failures can actually help you become anti fragile. As long as you learn from them, and you apply them so that you don't keep falling for the same tactic. It can make you anti fragile, and you become stronger, and you have a stronger security posture.

bill murphy: Yeah, it's [00:42:00] interesting. I know you've read a Kevin Kelly's work as well, which I read his book many years ago, I forget the name, but now was one of his earlier ones. And he talked about this concept of the immune system and the biological response. I think what's interesting with our networks is that ultimately, with vendors like yourselves, that as you develop products, they're going to become more self aware [00:42:30] of the global network. And so like the human body, when I cut my finger, I don't ask my finger for permission to inoculate. It's like that, it just auto deploys defense. And if I break it, and I gotta go to the hospital, I gotta get it set, but there's an automation that heals it. And then there's some amount of pressure that I have to apply with the doctor to get reset it and such.


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It's interesting, kind of the analogy with our bodies. A lot of it is automated. But still, if we get in a real wreck, [00:43:00] or really sick, we got to go triage. It's interesting how this is happening, and how maybe some of these strength over time maybe avoiding some of the bigger problems within enterprise. But just as you're saying, the anti fragile, some of the smaller challenges that they build, strengthen maturity over time, which will build that larger capability to be secure.

akshay bhargava: And Bill, this is one of the times. This is an unprecedented time, [00:43:30] we're all living through a global pandemic. This is also one of those times where both individuals as well as organizations have an opportunity to practice anti fragility. Some of the companies that are thriving, in today's time are the ones hat have built some anti fragility from a global pandemic. If you look in the stock market, there's some companies that have thrived in this global pandemic, because chaos [00:44:00] actually helped. This new way of working has helped them become even stronger, and accelerated trends that they're playing on. I do think that this pandemic, and I've written about this also is how the pandemic, has created this unique opportunity where to practice anti fragility.

bill murphy: As we wrap up, actually, I wanted to just ask you, is there anything in particular that popped in your head as we're talking that you're [00:44:30] hoping I'd bring up, or that you want it to go deeper and as we wrap up our conversation today.

akshay bhargava: I think we covered a lot. I think the only thing I would say is that, for those interested, I think the innovation framework,, purpose built innovation, is what motivated me to put that together, is really this drive that I have, that companies that succeed, and individuals that succeed, it becomes really hard to disaggregate [00:45:00] the reasons why success happens. And to make that repeatable, is something that I'm really passionate about, and something that I'm working on. If anybody wants, please check that out, you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

I put a lot of posts on the framework and the parts. Starting with customer empathy, we talked about that, talk about experimentation, talk about prioritization. So that by the time you get to the product pipeline, you have a high confidence that the idea that [00:45:30] you're working on, is going to be successful. And that's really what is a passion of mine. And it's one that I think has many applications, not just the product development, but also how you approach process change, how you approach building your cybersecurity posture. I think the applications are multi fold, not just product innovation.

bill murphy: Essentially you're really trying to take the luck [00:46:00] out of the unique luck scenarios out, so you can develop more predictability to your innovation capabilities, and what comes out the back end from the front end ideas.

akshay bhargava: That's exactly right. One of the big biases that that humans are wired to, with, if you read, like, the books that I mentioned earlier, is that it's very hard to know,


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when you have a successful product. [00:46:30] What were the things that we did right from a process and execution and customer empathy standpoint? And what were the elements of luck, and luck can take many forms. Luck is, we built the right product, we had the right timing, the customers were going through a pandemic that helped create the right environment for success.

Dis aggregating, what are the things we did right? versus what are the luck factors, and then being able to amplify the skills so that the next time you build something [00:47:00] new, you have a higher probability of success. That's really what my drive is. And now at Malwarebytes, we've been very fortunate. Using this framework, we build products for the consumer, like a privacy offering. We've built products for the small medium business like endpoint detection response, we build products for managed service providers, we build products for large enterprise.

And in all those four categories, through a lot of different dynamics, different competition, different requirements. But we have been very [00:47:30] successful with four new product offerings in each of those categories. That gives me confidence that when you apply this framework, you have a better chance of success than just trying to rinse and repeat whatever worked for you previously, because there'll be a lot of elements you can't control.

bill murphy: the service provider is really under the hook could be trying to solve the same problem as what you're trying [00:48:00] to do with someone's small office or their work or work from home. But then you're building, they're going to need different dashboards, different ways of looking at data, different way of looking at multiple sets of customers versus someone at home, they just need to know, "Here's my machine, can I get it back to a fresh state, again, that's safe."

akshay bhargava: That's exactly right. If you're an MSP, the types of products and solutions that you're going to look at, are very different than if you're a consumer or small [00:48:30] business. There are certain products that are built in design to help an MSP, for example, manage thousands of their customers, or what we often refer in our product sites. MSP has hundreds of thousands of customers that they're servicing. They need different tools and technologies to manage across that how they do billing, how they do licensing, how they aggregate and do reporting across those customers. Very different than if you're a consumer deploying it on one computer.

bill murphy: [00:49:00] Actually, this has been great. And I think it's going to be fun for security professionals and IT leaders to really see how you're guiding the ship. I think that's important. I see the mental approach that it takes to really solving some really fundamental worldwide problems that is, as you said, as you mentioned, these four categories of people are trying to help people and you're just really, but [00:49:30] putting gasoline on the fire of support for that. It's really inspirational and I appreciate you for your time today.


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akshay bhargava: Well, thank you so much, Bill. It's been a pleasure being on this and I hope that the listeners get some value out of listening to this.

bill murphy: I'll put show notes, I'll put links for everybody to see Akshay's framework on LinkedIn. Is that the best place where they can pick up with you?

akshay bhargava: Yeah.

bill murphy: Okay.

akshay bhargava: That would be a great starting point. We'll have more articles on other places, but definitely right now the best place to start is in a very digestible [00:50:00] format is going to be on LinkedIn.

bill murphy: Yeah. And you've had a lot of engagement there, tons of comments and it'd be fun for listeners to go check you out. All right, Akshay thank you for your time today.

akshay bhargava: Thank you, Bill.

bill murphy: Okay.


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Transcript of · Web viewThis transcript was exported on Dec 10, 2020 - view latest version here. akshay...