EP 2 – TechMeSeriously’s Sarah Tenisi on the Pod with Den Jones

Den Jones:

Hey everyone, I’m your host Den Jones, and we’re going to have guests join me. And we’re going to talk about things from security to IT. Try and avoid Zero Trust because maybe we’ve heard enough about that business so far, and really keep this lighthearted and fun and hopefully educational. As I like to say, a little bit of wit and a little bit of wisdom. So here we go. This guest for episode number two is Sarah Tenisi. She’s the CEO of the TenisiTech. So let me hand over to Sarah, to introduce herself.

Sarah Tenisi:

Hi Den. I’m super excited to be here. I’m Sarah Tenisi. I am the CEO and founder of TenisiTech. We started about 10 years ago. I’m also the host of Tech Me Seriously, which is a podcast, under which I interview leaders in business and technology. And I’m hoping to get you on as well.

Den Jones:

Awesome. Thanks Sarah. And so let’s talk a little bit about the first time we met. So, full disclosure for everybody that’s listening or watching, we have been good friends since, I think that, the very early two thousands when I first moved to the US. Do you have any interesting or hopefully not embarrassing stories you can share on how we met?

Sarah Tenisi:

Well, what, I think it’s so fun to think about when you and I met is, there’s a couple of ways to think about it. One, is how long we’ve been friends. And the way that I always measure it is in the age of my oldest son, because I can remember you playing with him as a two year old. So I think that’s fun to think about, and he’s going to be 24 this year. And the other way I like to think about it is in terms of technology. So I remember when you came over from Scotland and you were doing a Novel migration for Adobe, which was pretty significant at the time. Adobe was probably, I don’t know, way smaller than it is today, but still it was a significant undertaking. And so you think about bringing a company off of Novel, and I worked there, it was my first IT job when I met you and I was supporting their global email infrastructure, which was Unix based. So that is always fun to think about it. It’s been quite a long time.

Den Jones:

Yeah. I was trying to think, maybe I measured it in IT years. IT minutes or years always seems to be longer than everyone else. So IT would say, “Hey, We’ll do it today.” And then about two weeks later, it’s done. Or maybe I will measure it in alcohol consumed, which I think most of our conversations are usually always over alcohol. So this is very rare that we’re having a discussion and there no drink involved.

Sarah Tenisi:

You want wit and wisdom. I think that’s pretty much every time we talk, especially with the drink in our hands.

Den Jones:

Well, today I’m on water. Or it could be gin, but there’s no ice in here. So maybe that means it’s water.

Sarah Tenisi:

Yeah.

Den Jones:

Okay. So Get It Started, Get It Done. This is really where- the whole idea for this was I’ve got a bit of a reputation of getting shit done. So for me, it’s always the case of, I love to deliver results. I love to see results. I think most people in our industry do. And I like to see results quick, because I have really little patience. So getting it started though for most people is always a bit of a challenge. How do you get approval? How do you get funding? How do you get going? How do you get the team? Now your story is a little bit different. So you want to share with the audience, how did you go from being an individual contributor in Adobe and then through the years to finally starting TenisiTech tech. What was that story like?

Sarah Tenisi:

Yeah. So, I got started. It goes a little bit further back and it doesn’t take too long to tell the story, but I started studying engineering at UC Santa Cruz and I was one of those kids that did not grow up with a computer in the house. And so again, I date myself a little bit in telling the story, but I studied engineering and I realized that engineering probably wasn’t the best fit. And back in those days, MIS was not a major across the board at all different schools. And so I left UC Santa Cruz to figure out what I was going to study. And fast forwarding to getting that first IT job. I studied engineering, I dropped out, I was still trying to figure out what to do.

Sarah Tenisi:

And I told people what I wanted to do. I should be very technical. I was an admin assistant. Managing calendars and travel. And for those people that really know me, that’s not a great fit, because I’m service minded, but I’m also education minded. So I want people to be resourceful and a self-starter. So I was an admin. I told all my bosses, and lots of credit goes to the people that I worked for, because they would say, “Hey, you get this job for a year and then you got to go be technical.” And so I was at Adobe and I said to the right person, “I really want to work in IT,” And that got me my first IT job. So from there, I really think we’re all architects of our own career path.

Sarah Tenisi:

So I spent a lot of time thinking about, was this it? Did I want to be managing IT systems hands on? And I felt like I wanted to take a crack at IT leadership. And I went to a company called WageWorks. They’ve since been purchased by another company called HealthEquity. But what was really cool is I went from a big company at Adobe to a small company at WageWorks and ended up as the director of IT services. And in that role, I was responsible for a lot more than I was at Adobe. Smaller company, broader range of experience. And so I did that for about seven years and probably what really got me to TenisiTech was we were doing acquisitions. And we did a couple of acquisitions a year, I met with executive teams and I think this is where our stories converge a little bit and our ability to figure out with an executive team, what is important to you?

Sarah Tenisi:

What are we trying to do here? And so I met with executive teams, talked to them about what was important about IT, and it was really simple. IT’s a service. It’s not about being the most technical or smartest person in the room. And if you follow best practice and standards, you’ll end up with a reliable and secure infrastructure. And so it was really those two things that led me to start TenisiTech 10 years ago. And that’s what we’re doing for our clients. We’re defining IT leadership, making sure that they’re secure and also productive.

Den Jones:

Awesome. And there was a couple of things you said there. One was about your career journey. So, at the time of recording this, we just so happened to, yesterday, have a panel conversation as part of the Identity Defined Security Alliance joined by the Dr. Chase Cunningham and Mike Hanley, yourself. And there’s a lot of great career advice there. So I’d encourage anyone to go check that out via the IDSA’s website. The other thing you mentioned was about customers and delivering this service.

Den Jones:

So, Banyon, we are, a happy customer of TenisiTech. When I joined Banyon, one of the things that I looked at was how are we going to deliver IT to a fast growing organization like Banyon? And you can’t have one lonely, poor IT guy, try and do the variety of things that’s expected of someone to do. And also, it’s not possible when you think of, how do you go and grow the IT team? And we wanted to grow in a way that made sense for our business. So in this case, this model of leveraging TenisiTech, it made sense. It gives us access to the 30 people as opposed to one poor person.

Sarah Tenisi:

Yes.

Den Jones:

So, that was awesome. Now. What would you say is some of the key things that are making you successful now as TenisiTech CEO?

Sarah Tenisi:

It’s interesting because I think as a leader, we all have to evolve. And Den, again, I think about you as a leader, 18 years ago, shoot, I almost said 10 years ago, but it’s been way longer than that. And I really think part of being a good leader is learning how to evolve your style. You certainly are not the same leader that you were back when we were working together at Adobe, and I think what it is it’s about starting to recognize that our differences actually make us stronger. And in the time of COVID, starting to recognize that done is better than perfect. And we talked a little bit about that. So when you think about Get It Started, Get It Done, that is part of what we’re talking about, is you need to art somewhere.

Sarah Tenisi:

You’re never going to plan to the tiniest detail. And I think when you look at the context of growing a company, part of it is listening to your customers. And part of it is learning how to build a really good team that, as you said, can fit the need across the board more broadly. And we come across companies all the time that put the entire IT practice on one person’s shoulders. It’s really impossible to do that. So I think a big part of growing is understanding that it takes a team.

Den Jones:

And I think one thing is your role of CEO. What do you think is the most important thing, as being the CEO?

Sarah Tenisi:

I think I really boil it down to recruiting. Recruiting new customers and recruiting new employees and developing a set of services that allow our customers to be successful.

Den Jones:

Awesome. And then, as you think of celebrating, I think it’s partially important to celebrate on a regular basis. I usually celebrate every Friday. I think that usually is the beginning point of a successful celebration is I survived another week. So what do you like to drink as one of the things that you’d thank yourself for when you’re celebrating?

Sarah Tenisi:

I mean, my go-to is gin and soda, Hendrix to be specific. So a Hendrix and soda with lime, and to comment on celebration, COVID really did make celebrating hard. I am dying to get our team together. We’re nationwide and so celebrating is super important. I think it definitely has been a little bit harder to do lately, but when I’m relaxing at home, it’s got to be a gin and soda.

Den Jones:

Yeah. I’m glad you said Hendrix, because that’s a good Scottish gin. Being from Scotland, I try and focus on some of the good drinks from my homeland. And it’s funny, it’s been really hard to try and bring people together, whether it’s bringing customers together, or your team together because as a partnership you really want to celebrate even together sometimes. I mean, I look at it like, in my days in Adobe or even at Cysco prior to Banyon, I was always this social person, I’m like, let’s do a happy hour once a month, bring people together, diverse groups of people.

Den Jones:

And one of the biggest things there was, it was about building connections and other people building connections. So it wasn’t about me building connections. I already knew the people who were inviting, but the other thing I also said to the people we were bringing together was feel free to bring other people that you work with and let’s try and expand the group of people we’re connected with. And that, for me, it felt fun. It enabled you to celebrate stuff, but also socialize and treat people sometimes, that were partnering with you and your team. So that was always fun for me. Now, what would be the worst horror story in your career that you’d able to share?

Sarah Tenisi:

Oh my gosh.

Den Jones:

Business story. Not a personal one.

Sarah Tenisi:

Hell yeah. So I mean, this is a great question for any IT person, because we’ve all had them. I have to think back. It was probably four or five years ago. My son was going off to college for, I think his sophomore year, and we were going to see him off and we had just got a brand new client and turned out none of their hardware was in warranty. None of it had service and all of it was way past end of life. And this hardware was all of their forward facing firewalls. So all these firewalls went down. I think there was even an issue with the company that used to provide them. And it turned in one of those nightmare evenings of trying to Maverick server hardware together where literally we had pliers out and wire cutters, it was crazy.

Sarah Tenisi:

And you get to 3:00 AM, nothing good happens at 3:00 AM. I often tell my kids that. I’m like, why are you up past two? Once you get past two, it’s bleak. And that was a key learning experience though. So you are not allowed to have production hardware that is end of life, that is unsupported and that doesn’t have any warranty on it. Really simple. They were a brand new client. We had to move mountains in order to get their customers with they needed it. So I think it took us probably most of that weekend. It was brutal.

Den Jones:

Yeah. I remember yeah being on calls 36 hours long, or calls where you’re having someone at three in the morning, [inaudible] a new server and they’re so tired, they actually drop the server and then you’re not sure if the reason the new one’s not working is because they dropped it.

Sarah Tenisi:

Well, think about that. I think technology has fundamentally changed, even from the point that I’m talking about, which was only five or six years ago. And I mean, knock on some wood, but there are certainly outages today, but I’m telling you if you use best practice, which includes keeping things updated, keeping things patched, you really can avoid downtime. And I would say uptime, and this maybe sounds stupid, now that I’m saying out loud, that really is the name of the IT game, is keeping things up.

Den Jones:

Yep. And I think as you say, best practices, it’s not too tricky to stay safe and then stay available. Sadly though, there’s so much going on and there’s so much complexity in our world now that it gets trickier to do that. So one of the tenets for me is simplify, retire old stuff. And try and stay current on technology. And there’s so many cloud services available now that you should look to try and use cloud services first. And then only if you can, then you build something.

Sarah Tenisi:

100%. And 10 years ago, when I started TenisiTech, the cloud questions weren’t even answered yet. People were still super nervous. Fast forward 10 years, you have an exchanged 2010 server in your environment, you are missing the security boat. This is in 10 years, so I think that’s super interesting. You talk about being up to date and being modern. That is something, technology is not wine. It does not get better with age. And so I have to think that’s one of our core tenets too, is to modernize and streamline.

Den Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. What would be one piece of advice that you’d give everybody about where do you keep up to date with security issues on technology?

Sarah Tenisi:

We certainly follow a ton of security blogs on a daily basis. We have team members looking at them, as do I. When something hits CNN, there’s an issue. It’s been such an interesting time from a cyber security landscape perspective over the last couple of years, because this is now, I think, in the public awareness space. Two years ago we were begging people to turn on multifactor authentication. Today, we require it. You don’t get to tell us no anymore because we are saving you from yourself. You’ve got to be reading security blogs. You’ve got to be up to date on what’s going on in the world, because a lot of that is political these days. So we spend a lot of time reading about this stuff.

Den Jones:

Yeah, no, from Twitter to LinkedIn. The thing that’s interesting for me is I’ll see stuff online in those environments weeks before you’re getting to mainstream media.

Sarah Tenisi:

Hundred percent.

Den Jones:

And, like you say, two years ago, even five years ago, for me, it was MFA, MFA, MFA.

Sarah Tenisi:

Yeah. Five years ago. You’re right.

Den Jones:

And, and then you bump into application teams or other customers in the environment that they’re like, oh, do I really need to connect it to this? It’s like, absolutely. It shouldn’t even be a question though.

Sarah Tenisi:

It’s not a question.

Den Jones:

[inaudible] say for you guys requiring that of your customers.

Sarah Tenisi:

You have to. And I think what’s really interesting about it is the inconvenience. This is the common thing we were getting was, oh, it’s so inconvenience for our executive team. And I promise everybody that the inconvenience of ransomware or of being phished far outweighs the inconvenience of having to tap in a code. It’s crazy.

Den Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. So here’s one. The number of presentations and things that I’m delivering this year is getting crazy. But what would you say, it’s obviously not mine, Sarah, so not one of my presentations, but what would you say has been one of the better presentations you have seen this year and what was the thing you took away from it?

Sarah Tenisi:

That is a tricky question. I also have been doing presentations and I’ll tell you what. There have been a number of leadership presentations that I have been an audience member of, and one of them was a balanced accountability by this leadership guy, this leadership professional called Hernani Alves. And he wrote this book, Balanced Accountability, and I loved watching him present. So a lot of times I’m watching as many leadership presentations as I am, IT or technical presentations. And one of the things that I start to understand in watching these presentations is about building the diversity of the team. So, like I said, my main focus these days is recruiting awesome clients and recruiting awesome team members. I would say that those have been the most impactful presentations, probably not exactly what you were looking for.

Den Jones:

No, I think that’s cool. Because looking in your role, you’re engaging with a lot of leaders, you personally. Now you’ve got other people in your team that they engage other levels and the organizations, but for your role, and I think for any aspiring leader, there is a huge balance between technical knowledge, business knowledge and engaging with people because as you say, the service you’re delivering, there’s a piece of technology in there, but a huge piece of any customer service is people.

Sarah Tenisi:

It’s huge. The other thing that I was thinking of too, and I feel like this is apropo to a security discussion, the presentations that I’m giving on security are incredibly basic. And not to say that my knowledge is basic, but I still am really concerned about the level of awareness that’s out in the world. Literally I give these talks and I’m like, do these three things, and it’s literally use MFA, use a password vault and take your time. And so I feel like that merits something worth discussing here because I feel like, you guys are security professionals and one of the nuts I’m always trying to crack is how do we drive this awareness for an executive team? I work with incredibly smart executive teams and a huge part of my job is telling this story.

Den Jones:

Yeah. It’s funny because it feels like you’re a band that had the one good album and you’re playing the same gig again and again and again. And so many times you find companies are not even finishing off the basics and then they’re so busy. It’s like, I want to deploy an idea or da, da, da. And it’s like, hold on, wait a minute. Can you get MFA done? Can you get a password manager in place? Can you do some good privileged identity? So it’s interesting for me because security teams are so busy and IT teams are so busy trying to do all sorts of things and make headway in all sorts of areas. But they’re not even getting to good enough on some of the areas that are the basics. I used to always say this to my team.

Den Jones:

I want us to be good enough. And they gave me so much grief because it was always like, but what do you mean, not good enough? That means you’re going for shit? What are you aspiring to? And I’m like, no. It’s if you get something good enough, sadly you’ve probably got five or six other areas that aren’t good enough. So rather than trying to get that one thing to better than good enough, it’s like, okay, let’s divert our attention and our investments to get these other areas to be good. And then once you think you’ve got all the areas good enough, sure. Go spend some extra money on someone else.

Sarah Tenisi:

And let’s get better. There’s a couple of things. And that’s another key presentation I saw last year and this was something we talked about the other day on the panel. There’s a presenter and she, again, is a leadership consultant. Her name’s Vitale Buford Hardin. And she talks about perfectionism and how detrimental perfectionism is to a team. Whenever I hear you say good enough, I think about Vitale because that, for me, was a really big deal. And it’s literally the title of this podcast. Get It Started, Get It Done. It does not have to be perfect. Let’s get good enough.

Den Jones:

Yeah. And one thing for me with most of the efforts that I’ve ever been involved in, it’s almost like, are we going to be better than we were yesterday? So I know directionally where the strategy is and how we want to be amazing and vision, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is if you are so busy trying to carve out perfection as part of that strategy, you’re not getting there or you’re not getting there fast. And the other thing I also say is I want to get results quicker than it takes a human to make a baby. And people start, oh, that’s funny. And I’m like, but there’s a method to the madness. Nine months is actually almost a year. And I don’t know if that’s right.

Den Jones:

So 12 months is in a year. And nine months is almost a year. So, the thing is in a financial calendar, your budget is a year. If I want to get something done, I want to get it done before that year runs out, so that people can see business value and they might be inspired to give me more money if we need more money to continue. The other thing is, is nine months is a bit longer than six months. I don’t know if you know that, I’m quite smart that way. I like to get things done in 12 week increments, but ideally even better than that. So that at the end of the quarter, you’re showing some really good value and you’re showing progress. You’re giving confidence to the business that you’re making progress. So for me, that was always a huge thing. Oh, sorry. You’re going to say something there.

Sarah Tenisi:

Well, I think that is so smart when you’re talking about business value, because one of the things that we’ll hear when we do IT assessments is the business doesn’t understand IT. The business doesn’t want to invest in IT. The business, the business, the business. And I always feel like my job and our job at TenisiTech is to be good stewards of the business. I never look at it as the business versus IT. But I think part of being a good steward is showing that progress on a regular basis like you’re talking about. And I also think about when it comes to budgeting, it’s like, look, we’re going to reduce this complexity and use all that money we just saved to increase whatever productivity or security in a new project. And I think that being able to show that forward motion is when the pocketbooks open, as you said, and I think that’s so important when you’re developing an IT practice for someone.

Den Jones:

No, absolutely. And I think it’s very hard for IT and security to have scorecards and dashboards that really convey to business value. Because ultimately most of the time we get stuck into the, hey, this is number of the service desk, tickets are done in SLA, or we deployed 15 different things. Deploying the thing isn’t equal to business value. If I deployed an identity management solution, it doesn’t necessarily mean business value in a way that makes sense to the CEO. So there’s a bit of a struggle there because I think those conversations and seeing it from a business perspective has been something that’s been hard for IT teams to deliver.

Sarah Tenisi:

IT people are terrible at marketing the work that they do. I think the understanding in the greater landscape of business is that IT are the people that fix my computers. And it’s so much broader than that. It’s like, no. I literally got invited to a dinner party and my friends asked me to fix their desktop printer. And I was like, so is this what you think I do all day? Well, you have an IT company. And so I think that is really important again, is to learn how to tell that story. So you’re right. It’s not about deploying the tool, it’s about showing that the tool is up to date, that the tool has stopped these attacks, that things are maintained. I always talk about the maintenance and administrative aspect of technology and IT specifically, is the least sexy part of it and the most important from a security perspective. And I’ve had 10 years to tell this story. So I think I’ve got it down, but a lot of people aren’t quite there yet still. Like, what is it doing for you?

Den Jones:

Yeah. The elevator pitch is something that I think needs tuned and tuned and tuned. And then over the years, I knew one thing. Mid-level managers in my organizations were never getting a chance to speak to the executives two or three levels up. So it was really, how would you bring them into these conversations? I would do weekly sync ups or check-ins with my boss and then start to bring in some of my direct rapports so they could participate in the conversation. They could learn the conversation, so that if I’m not there or when I’m not there, they can have the conversation and they can understand that one boss, and what that conversation’s like there, isn’t the same as another boss and when that leader changes, they might ask for different things and what is valuable to them might be different.

Sarah Tenisi:

That is a super valuable experience for a team that does not get a lot of executive exposure. And it’s something that a leader needs to bring them along on, because I think executive teams, the people on those teams, are used to contact switching all the time. So they’re talking about 50 different things in a day. You do not get to walk in the room and say, “So all of our stuff is out of date and I need money” It’s like, what stuff? I always talk about context. What is the context in which you’re giving the update and who are you giving that to? So that exposure from a leadership perspective is really important. And there is more, I think, we can do as people who are developing teams in terms of helping people be more comfortable telling the story.

Den Jones:

Yeah, exactly. So outside of work. We all understand, we all have stressful jobs. When you’re not working, Sarah, what do you do to keep yourself entertained, emotionally fit, physically fit. Yeah. What goes on outside the work?

Sarah Tenisi:

I moved from Northern California to Southern California, and my thing is to be on the beach as much as possible. In the water, even better. I spend a lot of time walking the beach. And it’s interesting because I read Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday. And I love studying about stoicism, and there’s a piece in that book about meditative walking and turns out a lot of really successful people take a walk every day. And that sounds like maybe not the most physical, but taking a walk and really giving yourself the space to think about things, whether it’s your life or your job or anything else, has been incredibly important. And so I spend as much time as possible outside hiking, in the water and really trying to soak up the sun.

Den Jones:

Awesome. Yeah. It’s funny. Because I think more and more, you need time to switch off, get the brain not thinking about work, switch off. I usually try and take a walk at lunchtime and then I’ll listen to a podcast or listen to some music.

Sarah Tenisi:

Den do you remember, sorry, I wanted to ask you this, because do you remember what it was like when we were first starting IT careers? Would you ever even ask somebody what they did to like give themselves space to think and to mentally get better? That was not a thing back then.

Den Jones:

Yeah. I remember maybe about 15 years ago in Adobe, there was a leader that joined and I remember he had said every Friday afternoon, take half an hour out to do nothing but look out your window or something. And I remember everybody being like, what kind of bullshit is this? But then years later you’re like, oh man, that actually is so helpful to get yourself some time to chillax a little bit. And I think when you do that, you come back more productive.

Den Jones:

I started at one point going to the gym, in my Adobe days, I’d go to the gym in the afternoon. And, 40 minutes over lunchtime or maybe mid afternoon and stuff to try and get myself tuned out from all the distractions. And then maybe sometimes, I’d think about one problem that was plaguing, me one situation, whether it was a technical thing, a political thing. Work politics. And mull on it. And think about that stuff while I was getting some exercise. I think the world has evolved, especially with COVID, we’re not doing that daily commute. It means you wake up and you get yourself together, then you’re suddenly on and you’re working.

Sarah Tenisi:

Yeah. That’s even harder, is giving yourself that space when you can quite literally roll out bed and turn on your computer. You’re talking about 40 minutes during the day or half hour staring out the window on a Friday, we’re talking about four day work weeks. I don’t know how to make that necessarily happen right away, but I’m like, okay, there are other countries that do this and the data shows that you’re more productive. You can tell I get really excited about this stuff, because I think with this labor shortage that the world is experiencing, we have to be creative about retention. And so that’s one of the things that I’m thinking about. And I think about all those years, I spent working 18, 24 hours for projects, it really probably wasn’t great.

Den Jones:

Oh, yeah. It wasn’t great. And it wasn’t-

Sarah Tenisi:

It wasn’t great for our mental capacity and our health.

Den Jones:

The fun thing I do remember the time in Adobe, where in the early days, early two thousands, we’d go out for lunch with groups of people. We’d all have a drink. Some people would have a cocktail or a beer. And I remember as an individual contributor, and this was before the bubble burst, I guess. That first tight bubble, that we would, not all the time, but you definitely take some time out. And that was our equivalent of getting some downtime, because we were hanging out with friends and it was very social. You didn’t feel isolated. So for me, those early days were pretty cool. Now, as we begin to wrap up, what would be, a couple of things. What would be something that you’d love the listeners or viewers to take away from our conversation today? Leave them with one nugget that will serve them well.

Sarah Tenisi:

I feel like we’ve talked about so many different things, and I guess what I would like to leave people with is this idea that, we talked about IT a bunch. I’d like to leave people with this idea that IT is a very broad practice that you need a lot of people thinking about for you in your world. So from that perspective, I think that’s a good nugget. I think from a leadership perspective, it’s really about giving yourself that space to consider what’s going on in your life, in your job, in the world to figure out what your place looks like in that. And so, I don’t know, these are the two that pop into my mind at the end here.

Den Jones:

Awesome. And then, one of the things from our career conversation that we had the other day was you talked a lot about being resourceful. And I think one thing, so that resonated a lot with me. Do you want to share, from a resourceful perspective, what was your thought there from that discussion?

Sarah Tenisi:

I feel like technology is one of those areas where there’s a lot of information out there. And so it’s very easy, or it can be easy to learn about something that you might not have any experience with. And so my one piece of advice for people was to learn how to resourceful. And with Google, with admin guides, with maintenance teams, maintenance and support teams, it’s very attainable to become an expert in an area that you didn’t know anything about three months ago. And so that is one of TenisiTech’s core goals is to be resourceful and driven from a technology perspective. And so I really believe that being resourceful, learning how to find answers, and this literally is for life in general, will help you. Don’t look to your left or your right, wondering who you can ask the question to. Go find out. We’re at a post question, I think, part of the world, Google it, literally Google it and ask 4,000 people on a group at one time. I don’t know.

Den Jones:

Yeah. And it’s funny because I got into making beer. So that was my new little fun thing on the side was let me make some beer. And literally it comes with the instructions, but the very first thing I do after reading the instructions is I jump on YouTube. And I start watching some YouTube videos on home brewing and things to do things, things to try. And then already, I realized that there was things in the instructions that were missing. Because on the YouTube they’re like, once you do this step, make sure the things in the dark, and it’s like in the dark? It doesn’t say that anywhere here. So, shit.

Den Jones:

It could be resourceful. That’s that’s a great takeaway. And I think as I look at getting things done, getting things started, there’s one thing is I’ve went through a career where many times people have said, “Why are you going out your way to do that?” And the one thing for me, for the audience, in our relationship and we’ve worked together a lot, both you and I have went out of our way to take on extra things, to look for other opportunities and also seek advice from good mentors and stuff.

Den Jones:

So I think we’ve been pretty blessed there. Great catch there, now one thing for me. You’ve been an inspiration in my life personally, professionally. It’s great seeing TenisiTech do so well. So it’s great to catch up in a podcast, a little session where we can share our stories with the world and better though, next time we see each other, I think, like the last time we saw each other in person. We stumbled into each other on the beach in Hawaii, you guys were doing a family trip, I was there with my partner. We had no plans. We didn’t know each other was going to be there. So next time we see each other, it’ll have the same amount of alcohol, hopefully. Maybe some nice sunshine, maybe some beach. And I guess it means I’ll be making a trip to San Diego sometimes.

Sarah Tenisi:

It’ll be fantastic. I can’t wait to see you down here and thank you so much for having me on this. It strikes me that, we’ve been friends for all these years and certainly we talk about work, but when do we ever actually sit down and talk about this stuff? So it was a lot of fun.

Den Jones:

Awesome. Yeah. Thank you very much, Sarah. Great catching up with you as always. So folks, as we wind up this episode, I’ll leave you with a couple of things. So first of all, Banyon Security is a great zero trust, if I use that marketing term, but let’s think of remote access. I don’t drink the Kool-Aid very often, but certainly as a product, as a team, awesome company to work for. So as you start checking us out, please check out buyingsecurity.io. But I guess you’re at the podcast. You already found the place and before we go, Sarah Tenisi, TenisiTech. So Sarah, can you remind us again of your podcast and how you get in touch with you?

Sarah Tenisi:

Certainly, I’m pretty easy to find I’m on LinkedIn, Sarah Tenisi. You guys can see the spelling of my name. Also, you can find more information about our company at tenisitech.com and then the podcast is Tech Me Seriously with Sarah Tenisi. And we focus on having leadership and technology discussions with leaders in different industries. So would love for you all to check out that as well, and look forward to having you on that podcast Den.

Den Jones:

Soon, yeah. And then our next podcast, we’re going to have Julie Smith, who is our fearless leader at the Identity Defined Security Alliance. And we’re hopefully going to record that really soon and then have that available as part of identity management day that’s coming up in April. So thank you very much, everybody. I’m Den Jones. This is Get It Started, Get It Done. We’ll see you all soon. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening. To learn more about Banyon security and find future episodes of the podcast, please visit us at banyonsecurity.io. Special thanks to Urban Punks for providing the music for this episode. You can find their track Summer Silk and all their music urbanpunks.com.

 

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