My first three loves in life were sports, girls and technology.
In the fifth grade, my school bought new computers — yellowish Apple Macintosh IIe’s — and I fell in love. They did so little at the time, but I was fascinated with the technology. Every chance that I had, I went to the library and used the computers.
I wanted to learn more and ventured into basic computer programming. When I was 14, my dad decided to get internet access for the first time with a company called Prodigy, and I was instantly hooked.
From young hacker to cyber defender
It was expensive to be as obsessed as I was with the internet. At that time, users had to pay for minutes instead of having unlimited use, and our monthly limit was only 100 minutes. The first month, I went way over the limit. My dad threatened to get rid of the internet if I ever did that again. I couldn’t let that happen.
With the challenge of staying under my time limits, I taught myself how to code in Visual Basic, an easy but robust programming language at the time. The first program I created allowed me to get unlimited internet usage for free. My endless visits to hacker/coder chatrooms helped me figure that out. Being a young hacker introduced me to cybersecurity, which is how my career in the industry started. The more I learned and discovered, the more I felt compelled to continue down the cybersecurity path.
Years later, while I was a student at Brigham Young University (BYU), I was hired for an IT position in one of the largest computing departments at the school. Two weeks into that role, my boss said a new position helping manage cybersecurity for the department was opening up. Because I had experience in that area, he offered me the job and I immediately accepted. For the first time, I was on the white hat side of cybersecurity, learning how to protect these networks from attackers instead of trying to compromise them.
Classes, certifications and hands-on experience with cyber protection in a large enterprise environment followed. Cyber protection for enterprises at that time was very basic, but it was still far more sophisticated than what individuals and small businesses had available to them. Overall, we stayed pretty safe; the university had the resources required to protect it as an organization.
A beginning of HEROIC proportions
In 2008, I founded Lancera, a managed IT and cybersecurity services provider, which laid the groundwork for what is now HEROIC. Utilizing the skills and methodologies I developed, we managed the IT, cybersecurity and software development of many large organizations. In 2014, we expanded our offerings by launching Box Support, a consumer-focused cybersecurity provider. Within 14 months, we had hired over 400+ employees locally in Utah and many more overseas.
Life was good — up until it wasn’t. A perilous sentiment for an entrepreneur is the feeling of having finally “made it.” Business and life have a way of quickly humbling people. Having grown Box Support rapidly to hundreds of employees and thousands of customers without taking on any financing, I felt like I was on top of the world. A large acquisition was offered that I declined.
We then went from growing very quickly to needing to let 95 percent of our workforce go due to an industry downturn tied to an issue with Google’s paid marketing. Google made a policy change and terminated many accounts, ours included. Our main channel for generating new sales was gone in a moment. That was humbling. After laying off most of our employees, we took a step back and examined our reasons for being in business. We had strayed from our company’s original mission. It was an opportunity to refocus and rebuild. This is when we started HEROIC.
Democratizing cyber protection
Rebuilding meant re-evaluating our initial “why.” When I was helping BYU protect against outside threats, I saw that even though cyber technology had progressed so much over the last 10-20 years, the advanced technology wasn’t trickling down to everyone who needed it.
Every business is vulnerable. It needs a competent security team or provider, just like every business needs an accountant to tell it how much money it is making and how much it can spend. These teams help ensure the safety of its customers and keep the company from being breached. Business owners often believe they’re too small to be attacked and that nobody cares about them. If anything, it’s the exact opposite.
That’s why we started HEROIC. I saw the future of cyber threats growing at an exponential rate. We have a mission to intelligently protect humanity from cyber threats by providing advanced protection to everyone, not just the largest companies in the world. We protect what matters most to people, their families and their businesses, whether it’s financial information or family photographs.
I can remember the day I saw the vision of what HEROIC would become. While I was driving my truck, I envisioned the future of cyber and how AI would become the biggest threat to our physical and technical security. I knew if we didn’t start building a solution, we were never going to be able to outpace AI-based cyber threats once they were fully developed. On July 4th, we publicly launched HEROIC’s Cybersecurity Protection Platform to combat those threats. It’s completely free to sign up!
The 4th of July is celebrated as Independence Day in the United States. We chose this day to launch our cyber protection platform to celebrate independence from advanced cyber threats and invasions of privacy. It’s taken many years of development and understanding to get to this point, and AI threats are still in their infancy, but they are inevitable.
The future will be dangerous
We’re on the precipice of seeing legitimate AI-based threats. Artificial intelligence is becoming ubiquitous and progressing at a rapid rate. Cyber threats are actively being programmed to use AI to better evade detection and more efficiently compromise a targeted system. For these reasons, we have built our SAAS-based security protection platform, which connects with a user’s devices, cloud services and all the ways they connect with technology. This platform allows people to build their own cybersecurity AI and their own personal J.A.R.V.I.S. That’s ultimately what we’re now building at HEROIC: a more intelligent and integrated way to combat sophisticated cyber threats.
We were recently at the largest cybersecurity conference in the world, where we unveiled the enterprise offering of that platform, identity intelligence, which is intelligence based on identities that have been breached throughout the world. It’s called Epic; it allows organizations to protect themselves against third-party data breaches. It was a huge success, and it confirmed to our team that the product is severely needed. Four out of five breaches originate from a compromised credential. This platform significantly decreases the chances of a breach happening.
AI is an overused term in all areas of business, but that doesn’t make it any less beneficial or worrisome. When GPT-2 was set to be released by OpenAI, they had second thoughts about even releasing it. The thought was that it was, in fact, too intelligent to release to the world and that it would be too dangerous. Before they released it publicly, I was able to get my hands on it and even wrote an article about how to build your own AI system. It was like getting a glimpse into the future.
AI has progressed so much and in so many ways. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had a vivid realization: If you are not currently working to implement AI into every piece of your business, you and your business will be left behind in the next 2-5 years. The pace of intelligent growth of AI is so rapid that the companies implementing it today will be the winners. Everybody else will end up working for those companies.
A little advice
Start learning and implementing AI into your business. You and your business will be left behind if you do not start today. Every type of company in any industry can and should utilize AI as much as possible.
Make sure you get the right people on board. Your people are the most important part of your business. Make sure you know who you’re working with and get the best talent you can for what you’re able to afford. Never hire the least expensive candidates for positions within your company; otherwise, you’ll just pay for it in the long term.
Be resilient. Being an entrepreneur is hard. You’ve got to be stubborn. You’ve got to be persistent. You’ve got to have a clear target of what you are setting out to do. If you don’t, you will be pulled away. But as your resilience grows, you’ll be better able to break through all the issues you encounter. Keep pushing. If you know what you’re doing is going to work, don’t lose sight of that. If you don’t know yet, keep pushing until you do.
Seek after smart advisors. They’re the ones you can go to and ask questions on issues you might not have experience with yet. Having advisors to lean on has allowed me to grow so much bigger and faster than I would ever have been able to otherwise. Find advisors who care more about helping you achieve business success than how much they’ll be compensated.
The history of HEROIC is also my history. I’ve been attached to cybersecurity my entire career, unprofessionally for five years and professionally for almost 25. My passion is protecting people and the challenge of providing the technology necessary to protect them and their organizations.
How do we make people the cyberheroes of their organizations? This is a significant challenge that continues to intensify, but there are solutions. There are ways to fight back. Technology is progressing at such a rapid rate, and new threats are being encountered. HEROIC is leading the pack. Let’s go make today HEROIC!
