Go All In!

Go All In!

John Driscoll

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

7/10/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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um if what you're passionate about is what you want to go try for for all means go try it but recognize that no one else is going to be able to do what you do no one's going to bring the same passion that you do don't let someone tell you that crocheting frogs is never going to make anything it depends on whether someone picks you up on instagram or you get there's so many what-if possibilities [Music] [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host evan miller the serial entrepreneur and the founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with patents and trademarks um today on the inventive journey we have a we're going to hear another great journey from a great guest marcia marsha has been going for six years with her uh co-founder husband and partner in tribe hopefully not real crime but uh and uh they have a a fun um cloud security or expertise that we'll hear a little bit more about and uh before that uh they made so they kind of uh came up with a company that they wanted to to wanted to create because it wasn't already out there and it is since grown into quite the company and have some different employees and make it enjoyable and have a lot of fun along the way so welcome to the podcast marcia it's great to be here thank you very much for inviting me so i gave an introduction and i'm sure i slaughtered it and i told it everything wrong but as good as i could do with the interview or the introduction i'm sure you'll do a much better job so maybe go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little about the journey sure thank you i appreciate it well uh let's see i guess the journey really began around 11 years ago when oh gosh it's coming up on 12th that's crazy when i met my now husband at an information security conference and he and i had been doing information security since the cows came home i mean seriously since i got out of the army in 97 i'd been working in the military's version information assurance information defense doing everything that you could possibly need with regard to security and it just it just kind of honed itself directly uh into cloud security after i met aaron but we met about 11 years ago and got married and uh people think it's crazy that we've both worked from home for our last three to four jobs and raised a family together and that is the crate i would put the crazy part is that it was romantic to go to a data security conference and that's where how you guys fell in love that would have been the cra that's kind of like if you know two engineers falling in love or two attorneys that it's once more once in a blue moon so we have always said we both got into information security for all the hot folks that are there man that's where you go if you're trolling for hot folks right there so that's the story i'm sticking to i have to agree to disagree on that one i and i come back with an engineering background and i i didn't that's i was my wife was a nurse or she was and now she's a stay-at-home mom but i would have got to the nurse eager to teach you program or that's where i always troll for the the hot ones that i wasn't the the big i was uh wasn't the biggest ladies man so i guess i was looking at the wrong places but all right anyway uh we had a good time and of course we met in vegas because every security conference ever ever ever is in vegas and uh yeah so um at the time i was working for a very large um lsi in the dod space so i was working for a system integrator doing work for the the navy and aaron was working for saic and as a cto there and working on commercial contracts for managed security services and it just kind of went from there he hopped to some other places i hopped to some other places but ostensibly the more the more we graduated into our roles the more we recognize that uh the combination of technical um approach that we both saw was necessary in order to complete a cloud journey as well as the human side the people on process side that is often pooh-poohed when you are trying to solve the technical problems wasn't just wasn't being addressed and so aaron had been at aws for a couple of years and it had been a good run he was very happy there um but that was saic is that what we said yeah saic that is just a quick note i didn't mention it before so that's where uh my father-in-law worked for quite some time yeah or saic on uh some of their now i'll probably slaughter this one too it was with their radar and with their sonar and with some of their detection some of the devices there so yeah bailey's have heard the name and i have at least a little bit of a connection there yeah when uh when i got out of the military i was exiting hawaii and they basically said the two places that you could most likely use your skill set that you've honed in the military was mclean virginia or san diego and i grew up in san diego so i said um let's see nope san diego yes definitely san diego so been here the whole time and that's where he was also at the scic campus in san diego but there's also a big one in mclean virginia as far as i know so so i didn't mean to hijack you keep going on with your journey it's all good it's all good so he left uh aws and i was still working at the time i believe i was at trying to guess i think i was iowa active maybe i was at duels no is it dual spark dual spark is a small startup that was acquired by data pipe and was started by two dudes that left amazon and started their own company and so i was inspired it was a good company there was only 15 folks and it was really awesome because we were focused on doing devops not in a lift and shift fashion which is to basically take something from a data center and move it into the cloud to actually refactor making sure that the way that you're developing your applications is appropriate for the best use of the services available to you in the cloud and it was fun we had a good time and aaron was friends with the ceo there and so aaron said hey would you be willing to uh you know basically 1099 me out to uh cloud security specifically because that was aaron's background and he said yes and so under those auspices we started cl uh scale sec uh originally it was called scalable security but so many people abbreviated it for us that we went and got the dba like probably a year later and said oh fine more scales like that's good for me i don't care it's shorter anyway easier to put on the twitter handle so um that worked out fine uh i stayed on i went up to after it was purchased by datapipe i went up and worked for chef software which is an infrastructure as code uh company helping you do a lot of your network management and in the cloud as well and we i'll and i'll dive in just a little bit there so if i remember i when i always tell everybody correct me if i'm wrong if i'm putting words in your mouth don't tell me i'm free to correct them but so your husband had jumped over to it i think the startup you guys are at now as you continue to work for you know uh the different companies as that got going is that right that is correct that is correct we were both on all the paperwork from the beginning and it was our secret secret evil plan rubbing our hands together you know to uh to finally get us both over there but with three kids two of the boys were in teenage years at the time our daughter was quite young and two cats a dog a fish a gecko for a period of time bless his soul you know somebody had to make sure that the mortgage was getting paid so i stayed on at chef software for an additional two years and then i left at the end of december 17 and came over full time since january of 18. so before you jump to where you're at now i'm going to dive back to that just a little bit so you you had you how did you make that decision as far as because you know first of all kudos to you guys for both working together having a startup not killing each other or anything else because i think that's you know that's an admirable thing and sometimes it works out great you can be you know work together well and you can separate business and home life and everything else and other people just clash and it's not a good experience so first kudos to you but as you're saying okay you know and i'm putting again words in your mouth but hey we want to get a startup going we have an idea we'd like to get this going but we also have responsibilities we have a mortgage we have kids we got to take care of everything how did you make the decision of hey who will make the jump first who will keep working and who and then how to follow on question of that and i know it's a loaded question how did you finally decide okay now we're both going to jump over and do this full time um i don't i don't want to make it seem too dramatic but really who was unhappier and i'm happy can be a definition of this is not working for me anymore i'm not even i always tell people i always wanted to be in a place where i could expand my wings and i always felt like i was kind of like i could flap like this but there was no way i could really just move my wingspan all the way out and i think that aaron was in a situation after two years at uh two and a half years something like that at aws where he said i just i have to move so quickly as a member of pso there helping people there was such a deep need for help with the cloud security aspects that he only got to do like say up to 80 and then they had to figure out the rest on their own because he had to go someplace else now they may they may have gotten ultimately additional support but aaron himself couldn't actually stay because the work that he did was so vital to unlocking a lot of the problems that the ciso was uh you know staunchly against and so he would go in there erin would go in there and talk to these csos and make sure he or she had all their questions answered so that you know the adoption could take place and aaron said there's just bits that i want to stay i want to continue to fix i don't want to feel like i have to navigate off and so i said i'm i'm cool where i am so why don't you do this first and i would like to say it was a grand calculated and it's gone you know exactly like i planned but dude i i think right now if you're not if you're not planning i i plan three to six months in advance because look at 20 20. um so like literally you just kind of go i've got a plan but i'm prepared to pivot i've got plan a which is hey this would be optimal but then you've also got plan b c and then all the way down to maybe double digits because i think excel goes up to a z or something like that so i think it's important to have lots of plans all of which are a function of how comfortable are you with ambiguity and chaos because being a small business owner you have to be ready for ambiguity and chaos and farting now i'm going to encapsulate all that to what's that it's basically whoever is the most unhappy you gotta go go do the start up and chase the dream first person exactly less i'm happy had to wait it out until the company was well enough so then how did you decide so you did that he starts out and how long was it that he was doing the startup and getting the business going as you continue so i think his first two gigs were very long-range fedramp implementations in the cloud and so they were very long very long tail and so he did two i want to say two nine months back-to-back and then when i was contemplating coming over we were starting to recognize just as any uh quote-unquote ponzi scheme of consulting is you know you duplicate yourself and you resell yourself and then you turn to four to eight et cetera people were starting to see and hear aaron's name and call him by name and he's like i can't i don't want to tell people no but by the same token i can't keep saying yes because i can't literally do all of it even though he's pretty good at multitasking that way and so um we were able to bring me on and we had like two people that kind of stayed with us and then a couple of 1099s i think we stopped 10.99 in the middle of 2018 other than that we've had w2 since then all just straight employees um but up to that point we had been kind of like you know figuring out how how are you how do you manage the the incoming of the uh requests for help with the in coming uh you know the resource management versus the the pipeline two pipelines that you have to manage um we are very grateful and humbled and pleased that it turns out that what we were offering is in pretty much demand right now which is kind of cool so for the next it's a lot better than offering something that's not a demand well but people think i'm going to follow my heart i'm going to follow my passion i've always wanted to knit frogs and so i'm going to put these frogs out on the internet and they will bless me because somewhere somebody wants knit frogs and we will sell them and the truth is i didn't ever i wanted to be the girl in at five years old i was the lady on the back of the horsey going in circles at the circus i go that that is the job i want so no no i didn't ever dream of like cloud security type stuff as a kid grow up say when i grew up i'm gonna work in cloud security no didn't there was no outfit you could buy at thrift east for that with it had the plastic mask and the rubber backing and stuff no that wasn't that close so so you make the jumper you said okay we've got and if i were to kind of say back going back to my question lots of things we talked about so was it kind of it got to the point where was it an income based decision saying hey the company is making enough money that we i can come over or just by the it sounded more like it was the fact that he doesn't have enough time and ability to do everything and need somebody else that can help him run that's the very positive spin to the answer i would love to give but because i'm supposed to be candid with you it will be because i finally got unhappy enough with where i was that i'm like you know what i don't know i'm coming over there scoot over move that stuff the boat better be ready because i'm not jumping hey well that's that's what even more candidates are so basically both of you guys gauge if you got to almost your unhappiness level when it reached a certain amount then you're saying okay i'm coming on so so you make that switch you finally bull jump over i think one of the things we talked about is you know so as you're doing it you guys are a smaller company obviously versus a huge company and sharing it with you i like small businesses and that but then you're saying okay we've got these big companies and how are we going to compete and how we're going to bring the best talent over overall and everything of that and you know when you started to you know maybe trying to figure that out maybe talk a little bit about maybe the issue of competing with big companies for talent and then how you overcame that sure thank you i appreciate that um that introduction there for that um we wanted a consultancy that was basically a lifestyle consultancy and the lifestyle word kind of has some some loaded terms so i will define it as i do for you which is to say the people that we're looking for that we'll be able to do what we need them to do the magic unicorns that you feed special lucky charms every day in order to get them to poop cloud security amazingness those folks are generally in their getting married having kids have small kids kind of age stage they're not going to be like i can put them on the plane for 70 hours a week and they don't care if they have plants that die at home because they're just rolling in the benjamins and so i needed to find a way to get those folks to want to work for me and so some of the differentiators that we have that allows us to compete uh and and uh for lack of a better term steal away folks from other places or entice them that's a much better let's just i think it's typically strikes that's right we're gonna we're gonna entice them away uh we offer 32-hour work weeks that are billable the other eight hours are for you to improve yourself you should be working on blogs you should be taking some of the certifications for aws and gcp you should be uh improving yourself in any way that you see because by improving yourself you're actually improving the entire everyone levels up you know that everybody just kind of brings that buoyancy of the water up higher and higher and we end up in a situation where there's super fun camaraderie on our slack channel that hey did you see this thing here did you see this note here i saw this latest uh thing about this particular coding language here we've got tons of but it's fun people are constantly trying to one-up each other in a very positive uplifting way um we offer reinfor reinforcements uh money into your salary not just a bonus but a salary bump every time you pass a professional certification we've been talking with one of our partner managers at one of the cloud companies and he goes well how many of your folks we have 18 he goes how many um certifications do you have and i go um which kind he goes well all of them i said okay well all of them we have 99. he's like what and i go i think you don't really care about these ones over here so if you're talking associate level and professional level associations specific to your cloud i think we were at 37 i said but let me check at the end of the week i think we have people taking tests this week so i mean it's just it's it's awesome it's just i'm gonna ask on that because if i run you know and run into and i talk with and work with different startups and done my own and everything else you know the the fear i don't know fear is quite the right word but you know hesitation of one is to do the shorter hour work week is that you're not going the employees aren't going to produce enough to make it profitable right if i only have them work 32 hours or you know and i get the eight hours of certification working on yourself which i think is great you know 32 hours of billable time am i going to be able to make enough off of them to warrant having them on right and then the second thing is is now you not only you compound the issue with 32 hour work weeks and then you also pay them to get certifications with the you know worried that now they're gonna go work for somebody else or they're gonna you're gonna train them all make them a valuable employee and then they're gonna leave you so how did you you know how do you find that balancer figure out how to give them the lifestyle let them work on themselves incentivize them well while not either worrying about or figuring out how to handle if they end up leaving i know we pay competitively uh we cannot match if it comes down to dollar for dollar there's no way i have the poker face to go against any of the cloud providers if they want someone and it's finances that they are differentiating by they're going to win there are too many people out there talking about the philosophy that our company has about people first about take your pto we actually don't have unlimited pto and it's a calculated reason i give you four weeks starting i mean you you accrue at four weeks starting the day you start because i want you to take pto and if it's unlimited pto then it's kind of no pto and i've seen a lot of people um vacillate on that and i'm like no and i harass them and the way that i am able to get folks to um improve and even if they leave is by saying i don't i i don't know how to say this right i don't care if you leave like i love you i want you to be awesome if being here makes you awesome and you are happy then stay it's almost like you've signed up i don't know how to com there's no comparison that's why we've done this um it's almost like if you go to a college and you're there for four years you're a freshman so you come to my company you're here for the first year you learn the ropes i teach you everything i possibly can i uplift you i am proving you i i pour good stuff into you i feed you good snacks you eat your vegetables everything's good the second and third year you are kicking it and we're all making money together the third or fourth year when you're just about to get a little bit jaded to walk into the 35th client that i've sent you to and go no no your problem's unique here's a hug let's fix it you know you start to lose your ability to be genuine because you're just getting too tired of solving the exact same problem over and again because it's out there then i want to tell them where do you want to go next if you're not happy here because you've topped out and you can tell if you're talking to people once a week like i do you can tell when someone's starting to go where do you want to go i will write you a letter of recommendation i will introduce you to the people that are there i'd get no greater pleasure than thinking we've had a good run and i want you to go be amazing because then you are my prophet you are the person i mean profit not profit right okay um you're the one that's going to go out and say i had a fantastic run there and i'm going to send all of my friends here to work if they need a break if it's a ptsd kind of thing i've gotten 60 70 hour weeks i've got tons of training i don't know where to be healthy this is where you go to recover because you don't have to work insane hours you do have to invest in yourself i'm watching slack and if the little green dot is on on sunday mornings you can bet i'm going to jump on and go get off this computer well i i give you kudos i think that's a great way to set up a company i was probably you know i i worked at it you know making the parallels i worked at a big law firm you know top 100 law firm great experience don't have anything bad to say about them with the exception of i got to the point kind of the same thing uh you know i'm working you know i was probably working 80 90 work hour weeks and i did that for a few years and you almost get to the point of hey the money is nice and i'm getting paid well and there that works enjoyable but i just can't do this forever and then you do start to almost look for that lifestyle hey i do want to see my kids i do want to see my family and hey let's find something else so i think that's a great way to set it up that one yeah if it's just completely paid or on pay you can't always compete with the big companies they can probably outstand you but if you're looking for something that provides you with training and experience and lifestyle and actually enjoyable and everything else and still good compensation i think that's a much better place to position yourself i think it's something that a lot of startups and small businesses businesses can learn from we do much better when somebody has already been through the ringer i had one young man that i interviewed that was squared away god i really liked him and he was in a very uh coveted area of the co of the of the nation i could use him a lot there he goes well i've got your offer and i've got you know an offer from one of the cloud companies and i just can't make up my mind and i go then i'm going to help you and it's not a dig i'm rescinding my offer because if you literally cannot tell the difference between my offer and their offer you need to go there you need to go there and you need to make it happen and you need to be happy and you need to eat all their free food that they offer every single day on the buffet and then when you recognize why we are here that is when you come back and the door will be open for you but you may not come here now because you don't know and if you don't know then you're not going to appreciate it if you don't appreciate it then you're not going to really throw all in did he ever come back just out of curiosity did he ever come back we talk all the time on linkedin like we comment on each other's stuff all the time there's nothing but positivity i will never i'm so blessed and so lucky to be in this situation that literally if someone gave me their two-week notice right now i'd be like oh sad i will miss you you're awesome what can i help you with where can i where can i sign to help you be more amazing this isn't this is a job it is not a jail especially in this in this at will industry that we're in there are many places i know these folks can go i treat them fair i don't uh i don't think i overindulge anymore that i don't overindulge my children they're certainly guard rails and stuff but basically i just i'm excited i love to be around them and i love to uplift them and i don't think that a lot of managers and leaders think that way no and i'm in complete agreement so you know and that's it but and you know it's it's for me and it took i think every company depending on the industry depending on how you want to incentivize you're going to do it a little bit different you know i always laughed at you know there's engineers sometimes the biggest scene that would entice them to come work somewhere was a perfect workstation it had the dual screens mounted to the screen and that's all as long as you have the dual screens or the triple screens or whatever it is now that was what they wanted and that was the thing for a while and i think that as things adjust you need to look and say what can we offer to differentiate ourselves to get the type of talent and the type of people right because you can hire some of the best talent but it may not be your culture i mean as much as you mentioned i rescind the offer exactly because it doesn't fit what we're trying to do and you're not going to be happy and if you're not going to be happy with the culture we have it's not a good place for you so i think that's that's uh great hiring practices so absolutely true absolutely true so next so started it going successful we've talked a little bit before you have i think a cool way that you you treat your employees and everything else next uh six to 12 months where do you guys head now um we had our goal to meet uh 25 total uh people on the team that would be uh two or three folks that are on indirect i'm included in that list but the majority of them are cloud security architects engineers application security guys and gals we were on par to finish that q2 i still think that that's possible to hit the last five hires by the end of this year depending on how things go so i'm keeping an eye out i refuse to hire any more folks even though there's kind of a demand because i want to make sure that the people that i have have good long leads right now we're about six to eight weeks out with regard to um assigning folks to the gigs that come in um but it's there's still a lot it's there's still a lot of chaff in the air it's still kind of hard to tell what direction the world's going to go just yet and so i'm going to hold steady probably till august or so and then make a decision whether or not we hire another couple of folks um i have the luxury of knowing that we've always wanted the company to be around 25 folks so it's not like i'm trying to make some sort of ludicrous number in order to be cool and be gobbled up i just i just want to get to our number and i want to kind of hold study so the only pipeline i'm managing is not resources and pipeline it's just the work coming in that would be my favorite because then we can be very selective and be very prudent with our clients money that are like i just want you to do this for me and i go it's not a good use of your money i'm not going to use my people to do that because what you're doing is probably not the right thing even for yourself so it gives you a little bit more latitude to be more bold about the types of work that you take so i'm looking forward to that well i think may and you may or may not but i'll touch on it just because i think i think that there's sometimes you hire too quickly or grow too quickly for what you want as a company right meaning you may even be able to grow it to 100 people and i'm just making out the numbers but then it becomes a company that you don't enjoy working at anymore right so now you've got a whole bunch of people you're managing them and you don't even get to do the things you want to do anymore because now it's a big company you have to worry about investments and return on investments and everything else and so i think there's certainly a strategy to growing it and running at the company the size you want with the culture you want the people you want and that doesn't always mean no investors there's no investors no and it gives you the freedom so i think but i but i think there's a lot to learn there so yeah well as always i always i think i say it almost every time but it's this one's no different than i get to the end of the podcast and there's about 20 more things i think would be fun to talk about that i never have enough time to so i always say and uh probably someday we'll have or have you back on it'll be fun to talk a few a few more things but as we reach the end of the podcast i do have a couple questions i always ask at the end of the podcast i'll ask him now so the first question is is what was the worst business decision you ever made hiring is hard and the things that i've had to learn skinning my knees hurting my elbows making mistakes that i personally felt influenced my it made for better hires the next time but the number of times and it wasn't a lot it was probably two or three times where someone really wanted to work here and they just put their best foot forward and they simply were not going to be able to reach the level that we needed them to in the time but they thought they could they wanted to their heart was in it but we had to agree it didn't work and not there is nothing like it makes me cry every time i have to find someone not capable of staying here and it's always been um capability it's never been personality mismatch or egregious behavior or outlandish none of that and it breaks my heart because i know how bad they want to be here and every time i've had to let someone go i've learned something from it which allows me to make even better hires next time so hiring yeah and i and i'm completely with you one and kind of a similar note but a different one that i learned is you know i'm for better and for worse and my wife will say it's for worse sometimes that for better you know i i have a personality and i always some people ask me what my hobby is and i usually say my hobby if i you know i'll give a few things i like to work on cars and i like to you know and i do coach my kids flag football team i do some hobbies but i usually say really my hobby is startups right so i like to do startups i like to do small businesses and so but the problem is i always got one and i had to learn with hiring kind of the same thing is i always got in i'm like everybody will work just as hard as i will they'll all want to be the startup they'll all want to build it they'll all just you know they'll all be excited that they're getting and they quickly found that some people that are that way and they're absolutely great employees and others just are there for a paycheck and not in a bad way they do a good job but they're not there to build the company they're not excited about a startup they just want to get in get their job and for me it was always hey i want people that want to do a startup that want to be in a startup and like that type of an atmosphere so i think that hiring is one that i think almost everybody has to go through and figure out learn some of those hard lessons because no matter how many books your reader shows you watch you're not gonna figure it out until you have to one hire people and then even worse to sit across and let somebody go yeah it's very difficult very difficult so second question i always ask so you get somebody that's either just started in a startup or wants to get started kind of in that phase of life what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them it is it is definitely to recognize that whatever your heart is into pursue it until you can't um we are doing something that happens to call call colin cosett call us i lost the word to align with thank you to align with what we are also passionate about um if what you're passionate about is what you want to go try for for all means go try it but recognize that no one else is going to be able to do what you do no one's going to bring the same passion that you do don't let someone tell you that crocheting frogs is never going to make anything it depends on whether someone picks you up on instagram or you get you there's so many what if possibilities if you want to do something go try it and like aaron and i always said if this doesn't work out we'll just go you know dissolve the company and go work for other places like we've always done but it doesn't hurt to go try and sometimes just going to try and learning that this isn't let's let's try it again later let's go fall back regroup there is no shame in that because every experience that you're having is learning and growing and moving forward and basing on empathy and getting it getting it going and so go ahead and try and like you don't lose any face if if it doesn't work out it just means you've learned something and you're going to leverage that learning into the next thing that you do yeah and i agree although i do now want you i just want you to go and start to try a frog crochet business just to see if it works so no i think that's a i think that's a good there that's a good they're good advice for people i think that you know if you're you there's a balance right and i i joke with crocheting frogs in the sense that maybe if you're really good if you could do it but you gotta find i think you find a balance between what you're good at and what you're passionate at and what the market wants if you can find kind of those three things then you're going to have the best recipe for success and i also agree i think you made one other comment that you know a lot of times people are scared to do a startup not even because they'll fail everybody will see them fail right so you do a startup and then you tell all your friends tell your neighbors tell your family and then you know a month later or a year later or whatever period of time then they ask oh how's your shot oh it failed and now you know back to you and i'm back being a whatever you know excellent or job and you're worried that what they're going to think about you and i don't think that should be a reason to hold you back there's also euphemism oh that's on the back burner right now because i had to go focus on x y and z it'll come back again or it won't but you know what don't be afraid if it if it just literally you're just like sometimes just like that's just too much work i am literally not as as entrepreneurial as i thought and i'm happier to spend the weekend with my kiddos doing some barbecuing there is no shame there there's too many weekends i work just to make sure things are going right and it'd be fun to just kind of set it aside instead of being in charge so there's pluses and minuses to everything you choose yeah then but then i always find that i always dream oh it'd be nice just to be able to go home and nothing and then i'm like i'd probably be bored out of my mind after several weeks it would be a nice break but it probably isn't going to be long term for my personality i would agree i appreciate you coming on the podcast it's been a fun to talk about your journey it's been an interesting one and i wish you all the best of luck with your journey people want to reach out to you they want to connect they want to get hired by your awesome employment arrangement they want to use your services or just want to connect what's the best way to reach out to you marcia scalesick.com and we are out there at scalesec.com and i would be i am a big proponent of mentorship as long as you bring your ability to find your own bootstraps i will help you i'll point to them i will i love to mentor love to do it so even if it's just a curiosity going towards uh cloud security i'll hear and i will help you awesome well i appreciate that offer and i hope people take you up on it because it's always important to find mentors so thank you again for coming on um for those of you that are wanting to be a guest on the inventive journey feel free to go to inventivejourney.com and apply to be a guest on the podcast for those of you that are listeners make sure to subscribe to any of the channels we're on and uh for those of you that may need help with uh patents and trademarks feel free to reach out to us we're always happy to help thank you again for coming on it was a fun to hear about your journey and i wish you the the best journey going forward i thank you have a good grade you too English (auto-generated)