EP 1 – Get IT Started. Get IT Done.

Speaker 1:

Hello, and welcome to the Banyan Security podcast, covering the security industry and beyond. In this first episode of the podcast, Get IT Started, Get IT Done, Banyan Chief Security Officer Den Jones speaks with Banyan co-founder Tarun Desikan about the history of Banyan Security, the realities of Zero Trust, the particular niche of challenges Banyan is solving, and how these solutions nest within the larger trends of the security industry, the rising culture of remote work and beyond. It’s a great discussion. Den and Tarun go far beyond the technical side of security solutions and technology and delve into what it’s like to be a co-founder, what it’s like to lead a small company competing with industry giants, cocktail recipes, and even igloo repair. It’s a fun discussion, you get to know both Tarun and Den a little bit, so I hope you enjoy it.

Den Jones:

Hey everybody, welcome to our very first Banyan Security podcast, Get IT Started, Get IT Done. I’m your host, Den Jones and every podcast we are going to invite guests to join us and talk about things from security to leadership, to life and anywhere else in between. Ideally, we are going to make it entertaining. We’d love your feedback along the way, and we’ll just try and keep things fun. We’ll try and keep it entertaining and we’ll try and make sure it’s educational. So in our very first podcast, we’ve got a great guest it’s Tarun and I think it’s Desikin, Desicon or Desican, I’m not sure. I’ll have to have him explain his name, his origin. And then also we are going to dig into the Zero Trust company, Banyan Security with a Zero Trust Network Access company. So I’d love have to hear a little bit about that and we’ll try and use the term Zero Trust as little as possible, because I think everyone’s heard that term a few times. So, Hey, Tarun welcome and great to have you on the show.

Tarun Desikan:

Hey Den, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. It’s our first podcast. It’s our first Banyan Security sponsored event and we excited to see it.

Den Jones:

Yeah, and so one of the things, right? So we were talking before and we were just talking about let’s have a podcast where we can really just share our views, our thoughts, get some great guests in and ideally along the way, we are all always going to try and educate people, but really just enlighten people on some of our perspectives and sometimes, you know, hopefully there’s going to be some great takeaways. So the Get IT Started. Get IT Done is really because my reputation in the industry I’ve been in several roles where I’ve led huge initiatives.

And we find that people struggle sometimes to get things underway, get it started. And I was like, well, “Hey, I love that. I’ve got a reputation of brand of me getting stuff started, but more importantly, getting it done.” So in the topic of a bit of today’s conversation, I’d love you to share with us, just… You’ve got this company, you’re a co-founder of the company, so why don’t you introduce yourself, Banyan… What the company’s all about, but then more importantly, what made you start a company?

Tarun Desikan:

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Tarun Desikan. Desikan is how we pronounce it back in India, but I’ll take what you give me Den. And we are Banyan Security and we are essentially reimagining security for a world where everyone can work from anywhere. There are different terms bandied around, but specifically Zero Trust Network Access is the product category you would put us in. And we enable enterprises to connect a remote workforce to the applications they need to do their jobs. That’s what we do from a security perspective. How we got started is actually really interesting. We started the company about five years ago, my co-founders come from VMware, where they had built a lot of this technology for VMware-specific projects. And we just had this spark of an idea that just imagine a world where you didn’t come to the office and where the applications didn’t run in a data center, they ran in the clouds, what happens to the network layer?

So it was really just a technical problem that sparked our curiosity and you know the technologists that we are, we went off, we tinkered and we were like, “Aha, we have a solution.” And so about five years ago, we left our day jobs and we are like, “Let’s go do this. Let’s take our solution to the market.” Turns out nobody really cared. It was just the reality. It was a nifty piece of technology, and we thought it was earth shattering, but the mass market just wasn’t ready for it. But we persevered, right? We built the layer, we built the capabilities. We found some early adopter customers, Adobe being one of them. And fast forward now, five years into the journey, this is the reality, the world that we envisioned for good or bad is the reality today. You have a remote workforce that comes to the office once or twice a week, maybe at best, your applications are scattered across the cloud and you need to reimagine how access and security works and that’s essentially the problem Banyan solves.

Den Jones:

Awesome. Now one of the things I was thinking… So you triggered one of my random thoughts there. So we met through my team at Adobe deploying Zero Trust, but then we were really looking for a partner that could work with us on that vision and strategy. So can you share just some of your thoughts, when did we first meet and what was your story around that?

Tarun Desikan:

Yeah, I feel like you don’t know this Den, and I’m going to say it for the first time we kind of met when Banyan was at an ebb in its journey. So it built this awesome technology, we were so proud of it, but really the market reception was just not quite there. And in your team in Adobe, we found an early adopter IT organization that was looking for us. It was just such a fortunate introduction. We just met at the perfect time where we were looking for validation and you were looking for a partner to build the capability in your organization, and that’s how we got introduced to each other. And that’s how I think we started collaborating so closely because it was a good fit from both sides and fast forward now, three years in, Banyan is fully deployed and hey, then you are part of us.

Den Jones:

Yeah it’s funny for me, right? Because I can look at it like I was a customer of the company, I believed in the company, I believed in the vision and then didn’t really think about it. I was running my team at Cisco great company, having a great life there and then spoke with yourself and Jayanth one of the other co-founders and yeah, decided, “Oh man, this will be a brilliant opportunity. So let’s jump aboard.” And I do think we’ve got great technology at the company. I think we’ve got an awesome team, but more importantly, my experience with the Adobe time was we’ve got great partnership. So I think anyone when you’re looking to make a technology selection, one of the big things for me is, do I have a partner that I can trust with that will be in the trenches together?

And because not everything’s always going to be smooth, but when doing things go wrong, you want to make sure you’ve got a great partner, or if you need that special feature, it’s always nice to know that you’ve got someone that’s willing to work with you. So for me, that was all cool. And being part of the team now is being brilliant. I got a question. So you are Chief Operating Officer and co-founder, how do you describe your job to either your parents or to dinner guests? Like someone who’s not in this industry? How would you describe your job?

Tarun Desikan:

Well, I think it’s really hard to describe a co-founder’s job regardless, because on any given day, you look at what I’m doing, sometimes you’re recruiting, sometimes you are firefighting. Sometimes you’re writing code. Sometimes you’re making PowerPoint. The same thing that makes it very exciting for someone like me, who’s scatterbrained as it is, makes it very hard to describe to my mother. She’s like, and in fact, it’s just really hard to describe, but I try to simplify it. I try to say, five years ago we had this crazy idea. And the crazy idea is that people would work from anywhere and today on a day to day basis, we try to make that crazy idea a reality.

And it’s not crazy anymore. It’s just another business idea. But that’s our job. Our job as founders is to make something that didn’t exist real awesome at that level. I think everyone knows. I tell you though, when I go into the weeds of cryptography and networking, I put everybody to sleep, so I don’t go there. I generally don’t go there. I just say we had a crazy idea. We built this company now we just try to make it real.

Den Jones:

Yeah, so I used to always tell people I was an igloo repair man, because if you ever told people you were in IT, the very first thing that happened is they don’t want you to start helping them with all their crap, fix my computer, build me a computer. And back in the mid ’90s in Scotland, that wasn’t interested really in doing any of that. So when I moved to California in 2001, it was cool because nobody really… I mean, everybody assumed you were in tech, right? Especially if you were an immigrant and you came to the Bay area, but I would just start telling people I was an igloo repair man, because I knew for the start, no one’s going to need any help with their igloos, not in San Jose. And I figured it would always be a topic of conversation. So yeah…

Tarun Desikan:

I’m just going to go a little meta here, but the mascot for Linux is the penguin. And if you say you’re an igloo repair man, I immediately think you’re like a Linux guru.

Den Jones:

Well, I would never claim that.

Tarun Desikan:

Okay.

Den Jones:

I was an ex Novell guy and I did do a lot of stuff on Unix with sun, but yeah, Linux… I had probably stopped getting as technical by the time Linux was probably the best operating system or more prevalent, right? But for the older people in the audience OS/2 Warp, I really enjoyed playing around with that when I was younger. That was a great operating system. Now I got it, so in the Banyan life, right? So what do you regard as done? What does done look like from a startup. What’s the vision for? We’ve got it started, we are definitely underway. So what is good and done look like?

Tarun Desikan:

Yeah that’s actually a great question because when we… You say we got started and you’re right, we have, but if I just look back to how he got started, it was really Banyan. We felt like the Davids against the Goliaths of the world. For 20 odd years, the world has used networking a certain way and for some reason, we decided we are going to try to do something different. And I would say for the first two or three years, we were really swimming upstream. You’re competing with the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Cisco and Zscaler. Pretty much everybody in the industry just didn’t get it. And we would go out my co-founder Jayanth and Yoshio and I would go out, we’d give talks at conferences and everybody would politely nod and then softly clap. And then nobody would talk to us afterwards, like what these crazy dudes, but I think this is what happens in an industry.

In an industry there are always people trying to swim upstream, trying to do something new and then a face shift happens. And in that face shift, something that was not obvious, suddenly becomes obvious. It just keeps happening all the time. It happens in every field in compute virtualization cloud, and now in security. And so for me, getting it done is taking this journey to the next level where the relying on the network for security, which is the way people have done security for 20 odd years is just not the way for the future. And so getting it done to me is when IT teams around the world at every organization recognize this reality and they all come and say, “Hey, that Zero Trust thing you spoke about five years ago? I’m using it.” You may or may not use my product, but you’re using the technique. And so I don’t know if that’ll happen this year, next year. I know it’ll happen over the next 10 years for sure.

Den Jones:

Yeah.

Tarun Desikan:

And so I think getting it done is changing the mentality of the whole world. Not just one or two companies here.

Den Jones:

Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely a tipping point, right? Every project I’ve ever been on there is always resistance and people thinking you’re crazy at the start. And then somewhere down the line, everyone’s like, “Holy shit, they’re going to pull this off.”

Tarun Desikan:

[crosstalk 00:13:10] And I feel like it’s almost a requirement to have impact if you don’t have skeptics. If everybody on day one is saying, Den this is a great idea. It’s probably not a good idea. I mean, somebody else would’ve done it if it was that easy, right?

Den Jones:

Yep. And one of my old mentors said, in any strategy you want to have some level of controversy.

Tarun Desikan:

Yes.

Den Jones:

Otherwise, you’re really not moving the needle, right? You’re just in much of the same and you’re just going to continue to evolve. But that evolution, unless there’s some big leaps of faith and some controversy in that strategy. Now, I always like a little controversy. So just so for people to realize. So we are not one of these companies that this just… We are not a VPN rebranded, sweet, big behemoth. So what do you think is the difference between some of these big giants that really they’re just a twisted VPN vendor compared to us?

Tarun Desikan:

I mean, if you look at the products, right, if you get into the products itself, it becomes very evident to anyone using these products. But the reality is most IT teams rely on marketing. They rely on website, they rely on literature and it’s much easier to go into literature and change a few words. So I would say pretty much any of these big vendors, if they were a networking vendor that was built in the 2000s, they came at it with connectivity in mind. That was their job, they built networks. That was their job, physical networks and maybe virtual networks. And in the last couple of years, they’ve gone and put a ‘Zero Trust’ sticker on it, a ‘Cloud’ sticker on it. That’s not how technology works, right? You just don’t put a sticker on something. Well, the marketing message is pretty good, but I’ll name names.

You look at Palo Alto Networks or Pulse F5, they all know that it’s just a sticker, but they all know that it’s good enough for now. And that’s one of the difficulties in the IT space. Good enough is often okay. And…

Den Jones:

Yeah, yeah.

Tarun Desikan:

…the, the only way to actually figure out if something is really a Zero Trust product or not is to try it, is to use it yourself, use it in your environment, see if it meets that security posture that you aspire to. And my commitment as one of the founders of the business is that Banyan aspires to take our customers to a Zero Trust ideal. And we have a very explicit definition of it. We’ve built our platform from scratch for it. And if you can just take a VPN and put a ‘Zero Trust’ sticker, it does not a ‘Zero Trust’ make. That’s just the reality of the situation. But it’s honestly one of the biggest challenges for us. It’s what keeps me up at night is how do you overcome the marketing spend of the Palo Altos of the world? They really have the audience over the years in their pockets as it were.

Den Jones:

Now I think it was you that had the idea to create a team’s edition. What was the thinking behind that? And then what is… What does the team’s edition enable people to do?

Tarun Desikan:

Right? It’s actually, it wasn’t necessarily my idea. I got the idea in a call with Dug Song, the founder of Duo Security actually, and who is at Cisco. And I think you know him well, [crosstalk 00:16:33] then he has a very strong thesis. He’s like, “It’s 2020, the best product will win. The switching costs have never been lower in IT. And the best product will win. It may not win today. It may not win next year, but over a duration it will win.” And so that to us, this a light bulb went off in my head. How do you compete with these big networking vendors? Well, put the product out for free. Let people try it for themselves.

And we call it the Team Edition because it’s really designed for small teams, but the capabilities are full-fledged like every capability in Banyan is available in our Team Edition. And so it’s almost essential in 2020 to have a self-serve free product that an IT professional can try for themselves. And if you’re a true Zero Trust company, you should have no trouble doing that. But if you’re a rebranded VPN, it’s going to be hard for you to bring a self-serve product. I’m pretty confident of that. And that was why we did it.

Den Jones:

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Now, Hey, so when you’re not working, right? So obviously you put 4,000 hours into this job each week because it’s a startup, you’re a co-founder that’s what’s expected of you. So when you’re not working though, what do you do for fun? What’s your hobbies?

Tarun Desikan:

Well, I have two little kids and anyone will tell you they’re both the boon of my existence and the bane of my existence. And I have two little daughters and I live vicariously through them. I spend most of my free time ferrying them from a swim class to a music class, to the park. My life just revolves around my kids when I’m not working. I do try to carve out some time to do something outside, cycling, boarding some of my youthful activities, but I’m old now Den. I hurt myself more than I actually do one of those boards.

Den Jones:

And I can only imagine your snowboarding down the slope at Tahoe and stuff. It is probably not something when you’re back in India that you’ve done very often. So what made you pick up snowboarding?

Tarun Desikan:

Well, I had never even seen snow till I came here, but then when you see snow, something just goes off in your head. It’s light. It has no friction. It’s so fluffy. It just kind of sparks your imagination. I just fell in love with it. There was a year, I think 2002, where I drove up maybe 25 times to Tahoe. And I just learned that year, I just learned how to snowboard that year. It was just love at first sight.

Den Jones:

Yeah. There’s definitely a good adrenaline rush. And for me, I’m a bit of a shopaholic. So I love the gear, right?

Tarun Desikan:

Oh yeah [crosstalk 00:19:14].

Den Jones:

I mean, I love buying snowboarding gear, so I can’t help myself between snowboarding gear, but mainly buying vinyl these days. I just can’t get over it. So we are going to have a lot of success this year. I can feel that and we are going to have to toast ourselves quite often as we celebrate that success. So if you’re going to have a choice drink to toast at the end of the end of the day, what’s your favorite drink?

Tarun Desikan:

Oh, so I’m an Old-Fashioned kind of guy. When I say Old-Fashioned, I just don’t mean an age. I mean the drink with the bourbon and a bit of, and I’ll tell you why though. Growing up, we all watch James Bond, right? And it was the “shaken not stirred martini.” And I always aspire to have a drink associated with me. And over the years, the Old-Fashioned has become it.

Den Jones:

I’ve normally… I was beer and wine, but then my cousin got me into gin.

Tarun Desikan:

Oh yeah?

Den Jones:

So I’m a very simple gin and tonic, but being a Scottish guy, I drink a lot and I kind of try to… I’m trying to always reduce that and improve the life and things of that nature. So yeah, I want to kind of not advocate that everyone goes out and starts drinking. It’s not the podcast for that just yet. But just drink responsibly, I think is probably the thing we’ll leave you with now. So we are going to do this podcast on a regular basis. I’d love to hear one story. Describe to me one story from ideally a news article this week. So we kind of, we always talk in the office about the news and or in our virtual Hangouts and stuff. So what’s the best news article or story you’ve heard this week?

Tarun Desikan:

Yeah, I just followed this one, I follow crypto. In our Zero Trust security product, we use cryptography heavily, but crypto in modern literature refers to Bitcoin in and cryptocurrency and so on. So I followed that as well. And just this past week, there was a 250 million dollar hack of the Wormhole bridge. Essentially what happened is these hackers found a flaw in how these blockchains were connected and they exploited it. And they were able to basically put a transaction in that basically sent 250 million to themselves. That itself wasn’t that interesting. These hacks happen all the time. What I find really interesting is within a couple of hours, the founders of Wormhole patched the 250 million dollars, they essentially put 250 million back into the blockchain.

And essentially it was like, the bad guys took 250 million dollars away, but the sponsors of the Wormhole project put 250 million back in. I’m like, what is this? This is how I play monopoly with my five year old daughter. Okay. We have a bunch of paper money. She goes and spends it on all these terrible houses. And she’s like, “Dad, no, I have no more money.” And I’m like, “Here it’s okay here, take it’s just paper money.” And so I found that news article really, really illuminating. It really illuminated me on the state of crypto today. Paper money…

Den Jones:

See, I was-

Tarun Desikan:

… Lofty valuations, absolutely made-up rules.

Den Jones:

I was thinking you were about to say, and they took the money. They jumped into the metaverse and they bought the house next door. You’re Snooki.

Tarun Desikan:

Oh yeah that could be good too. I did see that Justin Bieber just had his first concert in the metaverse. Can you guess the attendance?

Den Jones:

No idea. 12,

Tarun Desikan:

11.2 million people attended Justin’s concert. I mean, the Biebs is great, but 11 million. Huh? That’s insane.

Den Jones:

Yeah, I wasn’t necessarily thinking he was that great.

Tarun Desikan:

Yeah.

Den Jones:

I mean maybe expect that of Snoop Dogg or something because this guy’s everywhere these days. Now I heard the rumor that Snoop Dogg is one of your idols. So what’s going on there?

Tarun Desikan:

Well, for not all, and I feel like this is a public podcast. I shouldn’t talk so much about weed and stuff, but if you look at someone who reinvents his career every few years, Snoop Dogg is the boss. He started as a gangster rapper, he moved into more of a musician. He started his own label. And if you look at his latest inventions, he now has a cookbook with Martha Stewart, he’s an NFL commentator. He commentates the Olympics, he runs his own VC fund. He has a house in the metaverse that’s worth a million dollars. This guy is just my hero. It’s insane what Snoop has been able to pull off.

Den Jones:

And he’s performing at the Super Bowl. I think, by the time this podcast airs, he will have performed at the Super Bowl, but…

Tarun Desikan:

Oh, I didn’t know that, well that’s crazy.

Den Jones:

He’s performing there. Yeah.

Tarun Desikan:

Oh, that’s amazing.

Den Jones:

I think him and Eminem so, yeah. So

Tarun Desikan:

Are you thinking Super Bowl this year or like 10 years ago?

Den Jones:

I don’t know. I don’t know. Hey, look, he reinvented himself, so hey, we will find out. We will find out for sure. So there’s a couple of things. So we are going to have some great guests on the podcast. So of all the guests coming up, which one do you think is going to be more exciting and why? Do you have any thoughts there?

Tarun Desikan:

I’m actually most interested in hearing from your friends or your colleagues who have kind of risen up the security hierarchy to where they run their own security organizations. Because I’ll tell you, especially now as a vendor or even from LinkedIn, all you get to see is kind of that final title and the public persona they put in their public channels. You never actually get to hear how they got where they got. I’m most interested in those kinds of journeys, right? I really don’t care about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that much. I really want to know more about the extraordinary journeys of fairly normal people. That’s what [crosstalk 00:25:23].

Den Jones:

Yeah, and we are going do, there’s a few things, right? The car on, right. We’ve got a panel discussion that we are doing partnership with the IDSA coming up. We’ve got some great guests on the podcast. For me, I’m really excited to have some of my friends on the podcast, from Eric Anderson, Adobe, and then Sara Tenisi at TenisiTech people who I did grow my career with. And then some other people that I’ve worked with in the last few years. Theresa Payton, she’s ex CIO for the White House, but she’s a CEO of her own security company now. And then we’ve got Elvis Chan who’s an FBI Special Agent in the cyber San Francisco office. And then John Kindervag, the founder or godfather of Zero Trust.

So it makes exciting to have him join. So I think there’s going to be, there’s going to be no shortness of great guests that we are going to discover. And we are also going to have a call out there for, or future guests as well. So if, if people want to join the podcast or if they have desires to hear from certain people, hey, let us know because that thing would be great. So Tarun, first of all, thank you very much. I know that you eat, sleep and breathe Banyan and you love the industry we are in and you’re very passionate. So it’s been great to have you on the show to share your passion. Now, as we wrap and then I’ll let you depart because I know you’re busy doing all that work business, what’s the one takeaway you would want to leave everybody with as you close out today?

Tarun Desikan:

Well, I’m passionate about the space we are in, but I’m also really passionate about enabling the next generation of entrepreneurs, especially security entrepreneurs to start the businesses. And the one takeaway I would love to leave listeners with, is there, you have to take some risk in order to accomplish a goal. I think that’s just the reality of how it works and startups are just the extreme end of that risk, where you have to leave your cushy job and you have to potentially jump into the unknown and not know where to go. And I think what is really important is to commit to doing it and surround yourself with people who can help you get there. And there are lots of us around. So I would love to leave that anybody can do it and I think more people should do it.

Den Jones:

Awesome. Awesome. Well Tarun, thank you very much for your time today. Really appreciate having you on the show. And so let me just give you some space back. I’m going to wrap up here. So everyone, thank you very much for joining us today. Hopefully you found some level of entertainment and maybe some education, I’m not sure. We do have future guests. Sarah Tenisi from TenisiTech, as I mentioned. So she’s going to join us on our next show. And if you want check out anything Banyan-related, then you can go to Banyan Security.io and that team’s edition. I tell you, it’s really brilliant if you’re a small team or if you’ve got a small team in your organization, you want to try stuff for free without contacting salespeople, which for me is a practitioner, I always love avoiding salespeople. So that’s a great way for you to go. So everybody thank you very much. Be safe and thank you for checking us out and we’ll see you again soon.

Tarun Desikan:

Thank you for having me, Den.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening. To learn more about Banyan Security and find future episodes of the podcast, please visit us at Banyan Security.io. Special thanks to urban punks for providing the music for this episode. You can find their tracks, Summer Silk and all their music at urbanpunks.com.

 

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