 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto Studios during these kind of crazy times and really taking a moment with the time that we have to reach out to some of the leaders in our community to give us some insight, to give us some advice, to share their knowledge about some of the things that are going on and some of the specific challenges that really the coronavirus and the COVID-19 situation are causing for all of us. So we're really excited to have CUBE alumni. Haven't talked to him for a couple of years, joining us from his house. He's Martin Mikos, the CEO of Hacker One. Martin, great to see you. Good to see you, Jeff. Good to be back. Thank you. So first off, just a quick check-in. How are you doing? How are things going at Hacker One? How's the team doing? How are you guys kind of getting through this time of difficulty? Well, we are fortunate in our company that we have a business that's maybe doing even better in these times because we do security where you don't need to go into the office and we do it in a distributed way. So all of that is wonderful for the company. We do have our first positive case of COVID-19 in the company. He is now fully recovered after a few weeks. He's back at work. So it means it came pretty close to us and we have others who might be in the danger zone, but overall we are doing very well and paying a lot of attention on health and staying safe and working from home and making sure we don't take risks because these are serious things that we shouldn't play with. Yes. Well, I'm glad to hear that that person is recovering. And I think April is the month of six degrees of separation where all of us are going to know someone or someone who knows someone who's got this thing. Is it kind of the curves? Unfortunately, you're still going up in the United States. So I don't think that's going to change. But on a lighter note, one of the reasons I wanted to reach out to you is you've got a long history of working with distributed companies. This COVID thing is kind of a forcing function around work from home and it never fails to amaze me how many people are on their first Zoom and they don't even know what WebEx is and they've never heard of Skype. And I think we get spoiled in the tech world. We use these tools all the time. But this is a forcing function. It's at the grade schools, the middle schools, the high schools, besides just regular companies. So when you were running my SQL back in the day, you had a distributed company not only across buildings, but across oceans and continents. So I wonder if you can share kind of, did that start that way? Did you move into that way? Kind of what are some of the early days as you move from everybody in the office to more of a distributed network? Yeah, it did start that way at my SQL back in Scandinavia. And when I joined, there were 12 people, everybody working from home. The CTO lived just half an hour away from me, but we never saw each other. I worked from home, he worked from home. And I remember when I, as the new CEO said, hey, we will need an office. We need a headquarters where we can have meetings and archives for contracts and stuff. And he said, no office over my dead body, it will kill the company culture. That was the view of the fund. That's so progressive. Where did that view come from? Because that is certainly was not the kind of standard thinking. It was weird. It was back in, that was year 2000 and they had developed a way of working with open source contributors all over the world over email and IRC back then, which is a predecessor to Slack, you could say. And they just developed that method of working together and making sure everything is digital. Everything is written down. You are honest and forthright in writing as well. So it worked beautifully and they didn't like offices. We ended up having offices and we had many people working from the office but there was nowhere, at no time was it more than 30% of our headcount of about 500 people who worked from an office. 70% worked from home in 32 different countries across 16 time zones. Wow, that's very, very distributed. So in getting ready for this, I saw some other interviews that you've done and some other conversations on the topic. And one of the things that you brought up that I think is really topical is that this is really more of a mental challenge than really a physical challenge. The tools are there, we have internet. We're very fortunate that way. Didn't have these things in 2000 like we do today. But you talked about the mental challenge both from a leadership perspective as well as maybe from the employee perspective. I wonder if you can dig into that a little deeper as you kind of look at your peers that are treading into unchartered waters, if you will. Well, I think it's a transition where you become one with the medium, like with your laptop or whatever you're looking at. And you sort of, you invest yourself in what you have in front of you and you give of yourself into it. Just like if somebody's taking a portrait of you with a camera, you have to sort of love the camera and show yourself to the camera for the portrait to be really, really good. Like that's what great photographers do. They get you to open up even though it's a machine and not another human being. And we have to develop this skill digitally to sit in front of a laptop or a phone or something and be our whole genuine selves showing all dimensions and aspects of our personality. Because we don't realize it, but when you go to an office people are paying attention to how you walk, where you stop, what you look like, whether you look angry or happy, whether you look tired or not, when you go to the restroom, when you don't, like who knows all these things that people pay attention to that give you, give away how you feel and how you are. And then somebody may come and say, hey, Jeff seems to be in a bad mood today or Jeff seems to be in a good mood today. And those are vital functions of a group that works together. So you must allow the digital world to have the same. You have to bring that part of yourself into the digital realm and sort of open up. And people make the mistake that they just bring their professional selves. They just say, okay, what's the task? What's the work? Let's agree on something. Let's listen to everybody. And they don't leave a reserved room for the social side and showing who you are. Because people won't ultimately trust you until they know that you are a human being and you have weaknesses and vulnerabilities. You can be silly and sometimes you look good and sometimes you don't look good and sometimes you are to your advantage and sometimes you aren't. And until you've covered the whole range of your own expressions, you're not believable. Yeah. Another topic that came up is measurement, right? In KPIs and how do you measure people's performance? And it wasn't that long ago that Ginny Remedi at IBM came out and said, we don't want remote workers anymore. We want everybody to come check into the office. Well, that's changed a little bit. But you mentioned that we're so used to measuring things the way that we've always measured in the past. Are they there at eight? Do they stay till five or six? Do they look busy as opposed to really focusing on outputs? And you talked about really shifting your mindset with a distributed workforce to make sure you're focusing on the right outcomes, not necessarily focusing on the things that maybe as you said, as much as subconsciously you were paying attention to as much as anything. It's so easy to fake it in an office. I love that. You go in there, you look busy and people think you're amazing. But when you work from home, the only thing you have to show for is your work results. So it becomes much more objective. And of course you have to create metrics that can be tracked in a way that others can understand what you're doing. But it actually makes it more straightforward because you can't fake it. Right, right. It's the only thing you can be measured by is what you are actually producing. It's going to be interesting when we come out of this, right? Because there's a lot of psychology done around habits and how things become habits. And the way things become habits is you do them for a while in sequence, repeatedly, and then that becomes kind of part of your routine. And before even here at theCUBE, remote interviews were probably, I don't know, 5% of our total output. Now they're going to be 100% for the foreseeable future. So as you look at kind of people that are new to this world of remote learning and remote working, it's going to be wild after they do this for a couple of weeks, hopefully get into the habit to then, as you said, and some prior things, this becomes the new normal and going to the office is the once every so often when we actually have to have a big team meeting or some specific event. So you think this is going to probably be that tipping point to this becomes the new normal? I do think so. I think it will flip so that now you may think that you and I are having a virtual conversation and it would be a real conversation if we were in the same room, that will flip. Soon this will be the real conversation and if we meet in person, then it's an anomaly and that's the virtual thing. Because most of the time we will connect like this and we will figure out ways to understand each other and know whether we can trust each other and sort of all these things will evolve on the digital side. And there's no reason why they wouldn't other than the reluctance of human beings to change their behavior. And nurse was a powerful thing. So let's say that first we form habits, then habits form us. There you go. And that's how it happens. If you create some habit and then you become prisoner of that habit that you created and you can't get rid of it but you just have to force yourself out of it. And this is a forcing function like none other in terms of this whole world. So shifting gears a little bit to kind of your day job beyond just leading but actually worrying about security. RSA was the last big show we went to late January or early February, all about security. Hacker one's all about security. I would imagine now that everybody's working from home and the pressure on bring your own devices and we're seeing all this funny stuff about Zoom. It's the greatest things in sliced bread and of course everybody's jumping on all the vulnerabilities, et cetera. What are you seeing in kind of the hacker world and security world as there's huge shift has moved to people working from home and remote schools, et cetera? Well, it's clear that society now has to work from home and figure out distributed ways of getting education or work done. And as a result, criminality will go there as well. So we have to protect ourselves well. The first other problems is how do you protect yourself when you work from home? So then you talk about VPNs and how do you handle credentials and authentication and multi-factor authentication to make sure that the connection is authentic and protect? So that's the first one. The first order challenge that we have now, right now going on, but on a little bit longer scale we are seeing now companies deciding to start using cloud services even more than before because they realize that this could come back a situation like we are having now could come back and you will again be at home. And then they say, how do we build our software and IT infrastructure such that we are not needed in the office? And the answer is move to the cloud. So, and when you move to the cloud, you again, the security posture changes somewhat. You don't have to worry about network security anymore, but you do have to worry much more about app sec application security. So whatever happens here, they are useful transitions but they will put demands on security teams and business leaders to reevaluate what they spend money on insecurity. We are very fortunate that Hacker One to be on the winning side here. Our service is exactly for this distributed virtual digital world. So we are needed even more every day, more and more because things are going online. But companies will need to rethink those things and stop spending on things that don't make sense anymore. Yeah, it is just wild, right? This forcing function is really making everybody evaluate things a little bit closer and pushing them through that inertia, that before you could kind of put it off, put it off, put it off. You can't put it off anymore, times now. Right, yeah. Well, we had a similar like when Y2K happened, we also had a hard limit and we had to get stuff done. Now it's coming in a different way, sort of the punishment came without announcement, but we are in a similar crunch to get it done and we will, but it will be difficult and it will put a lot of strain on people and the systems, but I do believe it's doable. Good. So I want to shift gears one last time. You talked really about open source. You know, you've built your career on open source. My SQL was obviously open source and got bought by Sun eventually. Now, you know, part of Oracle's portfolio, then you did Eucalyptus, that was open source, right? Eventually got bought by HP and now Hacker One, you're using really a network of hackers all over the world to really help deliver this service. So I'm just curious to get your take on, on the role of open source. You know, it's been such a creative force for development. It's been such a creative force for, for kind of moving technology forward. How do you see it playing out now? What's the role of open source? Are you seeing projects? Are you seeing, you know, people rallying around, you know, bringing the power of data and analytics and cloud to this problem? Because to me, there's clearly a human toll of people being sick, but it's also a big data problem in terms of resource allocation and, you know, trying to sequence this thing and accelerate vaccine development. You know, there's a lot of kind of big data opportunities here to attack this thing. I think open source is even bigger now than it used to be. And it is a very powerful example of the fact that no matter how much we are threatened and we feel like we have to hunker down and isolate ourselves from others and foreign groups or people are dangerous, in reality, the biggest accomplishments in society are always about collaboration by large groups of really intelligent driven people. And because software is eating the world, open source is eating the world. And today, if you don't use open source software, you're just plain stupid. So it has really taken over the whole world and it is now enabling all these new innovations and initiatives that we didn't do before in big data, collecting big data, analyzing data. We see it in the whole area of DNA medicine where the researchers are sharing their findings with everybody. And that's very much like open source software. They don't call it open source software, but the mechanisms are the same. Everybody is doing it for their own good, but by sharing it, they multiply the value of what they did and it speeds up innovation so that it outperforms anything done in a closed laboratory or a closed source company. So it's wonderful to sort of have been part of the open source revolution because it is spawning so many other initiatives and phenomena on a societal level. And this is just the beginning. It will go into politics, it will go into news, it will go into the assessment of fake news. Reddit is completely self-moderated. They don't hire the moderators. The moderators are provided by the community and they self-moderate. And understanding how to self-govern, self-moderate at very large scale, that's the key to success in many areas. So open source software is enormous and yet it's just one little part of the whole world of community-driven innovation. Such a great lesson though, because as we think back to kind of the last kind of national rally around say World War II where Kaiser started building ships and Ford was building airplanes and we've got some of that going on with Elon Musk and people building respirators and some of these physical things, but there's this whole kind of software and big data AI machine learning thing that's happening on the background around the genome and the vaccine development that's not quite as visible, but really such an important part of this battle that we haven't seen and then of course the other place there's no place to hide. The fact that this is happening all over the globe at the same time to everyone regardless of your religion, your politics, your geography. It's really a unique moment in time. Hopefully one that we're not going to reach. It could be our best hope against coronavirus. The fact that the scientists are right now working together, sharing their findings, quickly going from one test to the next and figuring out what works. And mankind hasn't had that capacity before, but now we do. So we can't know whether it will take a long time or a short time, but at least we are getting all the resources to bear and we put them together and people share, which is what's driving the innovation here. All right, Martin, I guess just a last kind of topic before I let you go, kind of circling fully back to leadership. One of the comments you talked about is about these types of times really favoring the bold. I really like that line. Don't be scared. It's really an opportunity for the people who have it together and are making the right priorities to shine and to really kind of rise above the fray. I wonder if you can share a little bit more of your thoughts about that as from a leadership point of view, it's a time of challenge, but it's really also a time of opportunity. I think it is, it's exactly like you said, it's like the Stockdale paradox, you know, Admiral Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war and over seven years and was tortured during those years and he, every day he decided to, on one hand, be ready to face any brutal reality he might face, but on the other hand, never give up hope that one day he will come out and have no regrets, not looking back and be a free man again. And that's exactly what happened. Of course, we are not in as dire situation as he was, but society has a similar situation that we must have the courage to face the exact brutality of and the reality of coronavirus right now without thinking that we won't come out of it. We will absolutely come out of it and we'll come out of it with innovations and new models that will outshine whatever we had before. And we must be able to maintain this duality of, okay, I'm ready to face the reality and I'm ready to be in isolation, I'm ready to use a face mask, whatever it takes, but I also, I will never give up hope about what will come once we come out of this. And with that mindset, as a company, as a family, an individual human being or a society, you can get through any problem. And this is what Admiral Stockdale taught us through his experience and by sharing it with everybody. Well, Martin, thank you for sharing that story and thank you for sharing your experience and kind of your point of view. We really appreciate it. These are tough times and it's great to be able to look out the leaders and to kind of share the burden if you will and hear from smart folks that have a point of view. So thank you very much for your time, best to your employee, glad that person is recovering. And as you said, we will get through this and we'll come out stronger the other side. Thanks a lot. Absolutely. Thank you, Jeff. All right, thanks, Martin. Jeff Frick here, signing off from the Palo Alto Studios from theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.