Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:41:02 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:41:02] S1: I wanna double click on responsibility right now, because I I think we actually all feel it. I literally can feel that we are on the edge of something that will unleash greatness, and and as you just said, is also really scary. What scares you? And what do we do about it? [00:41:23] S0: Yeah. I mean, not... Nothing here really is... Like, it it... It's it's more exhilarating, I guess, rather than scary is the right thing. The right way to put it, I don't really know or believe in this, like, super sentient thing that's going to destroy humanity. I hope I'm wrong. But if... Or I hope I'm right. [00:41:42] S1: Me too. Sorry. [00:41:43] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hope I'm right. Yeah. If I'm wrong, it's too late. We can't really fix it anyway. So we'll just, you know, be nice to the robots. I always say thank you to the Waymo's after I get out. I hope they remember that when they take over. [00:41:55] S1: Oh, wait. Thank you too. I'd I'd like... I say thank you. I'm like, appreciate you, and then I'm like, oh my god. No. No. I'm like, I just wasted compute. Okay. Here we are. [00:42:04] S0: Yeah. So I I don't really buy that one coming, but, yeah, the rest of this, it... It's people doing bad things with incredibly effective tooling, I think, is what we have to worry about. [00:42:14] S1: I've read a number of books that can paint how the the... Those those edge cases that could be profound. [00:42:21] S0: This is... They tell me this is how the world ends, that one. Great book. Yeah.
00:42:21 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:42:21] S0: This is... They tell me this is how the world ends, that one. Great book. Yeah. [00:42:26] S1: What a what a great book. One more question before we go to the quick fire round, which is, in so many ways, you are really playing offense to security in what you're doing and really trying to empower a world where we can leverage these incredible technologies safely. Right now, in every company, it's engineering and then security is over here. Right? It's like this separate function that then looks at everything and assesses risks. How does that evolve? Is it just part of engineering going forward and it should never be a separate function? How do you think about that?
00:43:07 · Dan Lorenc
[00:43:07] S0: Yeah. I think it's it's already done that in a lot of organizations. Right? There's always gonna be a central security function because there's things outside of engineering that need security too. There's physical security. There's IT security. There's all sorts of other types of security that still matter and aren't really core to engineering. If you're a company that has no engineering team and doesn't build software, you still need a security team. So I think, know, that that part kinda stays the same. But for product security and application security and security for software itself, I think most organizations already realize that. You hear the whole shift left buzzword a lot, and I think it's really like catch up left because cloud providers and modern DevOps put a lot more control into engineers' hands than they ever had before. You just have to file a ticket if you wanted a new server to deploy something onto and have, you know, some operations team install the packages and everything you needed on that server. Making the cloud programmable, put that in the hands of every engineer. You can now spin up whatever you need just with a CLI, which is great. Engineers can now do everything they need to. They're not blocked, but security teams sitting at the end no longer had that natural gating function. So they figured out that if they wanted to be involved in the security of the products, they couldn't wait until they were about to ship and go look at the security of those products. They were shipping before it got to that point. So that shift left was really a a run left, to where those decisions, were actually being made. I think inside of that, most organizations have already moved to that space, and I think it's the right one.
00:44:30 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:44:30] S1: That's great. And and and I agree with you. Dan, I wanna move to a quick fire round. I'm just gonna ask a question. You give us the the the first thought that comes to your mind. What is a book that shaped you? A book that you would recommend people read? [00:44:44] S0: You know, one of the last ones that I just got a ton out of, and I keep going back through it, is Qualified Sales Leader. It's so good for explaining how enterprise sales works to someone that knows nothing about how enterprise sales works. Somebody else that I read every day that's incredible is not a book, though. It's Matt Levine's newsletter. It's, it's about financial systems and markets and all this, but he covers everything. And, like, yeah, I I I didn't know how any of this stuff worked, and he does just a great job of explaining it. [00:45:10] S1: Thanks for paying that forward to everybody. What is a mantra that you think kinda defines how you move through the world? [00:45:17] S0: Yeah. [00:45:18] S1: I I would say we kind of have... I feel like a lot of us have something that kinda runs through the back of our head. What's yours?
00:45:18 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:45:18] S1: I I would say we kind of have... I feel like a lot of us have something that kinda runs through the back of our head. What's yours? [00:45:24] S0: Yeah. We have a couple inside of the company. One that we used to try to explain the work that we do. It's... This shit is hard. And we're doing hard work and stuff that not everyone wants to be doing. And that's how we explain the value that we give. Yeah. I I have one of these little things printed out on my desk, but that's probably the biggest one we talk about all the time as we as we do hard and annoying things and pass that value onto our customers. [00:45:45] S1: By the way, that is the mantra I want you to have, which is you're taking the hard stuff off our plate, so thank you. Who's someone you admire? And and I don't mean, like, a family member. I mean, somebody moving through this world that you're grateful for and why? [00:46:02] S0: Oh, you know, I I love our investors. I talk to them all the time. A lot of people talk about strange founder dynamics and board management and all of this stuff, but maybe we got incredibly lucky or what, but you know, I trust all of our investors in the cap table. I talk to them almost as often as I talk to everyone inside of the company. It's it's great, and I I really recommend any founders, anyone out there, to try to have that relationship with their investors. [00:46:25] S1: I think that would change it. [00:46:27] S0: Lot easier. [00:46:27] S1: Mhmm. It it makes life a lot easier. I I couldn't agree with you more. What's an underrated risk in software today?
00:46:27 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:46:27] S1: Mhmm. It it makes life a lot easier. I I couldn't agree with you more. What's an underrated risk in software today? [00:46:35] S0: I I I flip it a bit, and I I... The the biggest risk that I worry about in software is, non software teams now being software teams, and not knowing what that means and not knowing how to do that safely. So, yeah, I I I think the risk is now everyone is a software engineer whether they know it or not. [00:46:52] S1: No. I... I'm a software engineer. I I I deeply appreciate that point. What's your best tip of how you're using AI in your personal life where you're just like, wow. That's better. What is that? [00:47:07] S0: In my personal life, the same as my professional life, honestly. Like, reading, planning, writing, thinking about things. I use it, not like a... I'm not one of these people that got addicted to g p t four o and had a codependency or anything on it, is kinda terrifying. But, yeah, like, a a a thought partner. I just dump in ideas, dump in notes all the time, whether it's about personal stuff or work stuff, know, using the memory feature to recall all these conversations, give me advice, researching things I'm gonna buy, kind of all of this. You know, the ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude UIs really have replaced search engines for me.