In this episode of Never Too Early’s “Founder Therapy” series, Lauren Ipsen, talent partner at Decibel, sits down with Ash Devata, the CEO of GreyNoise Intelligence. Ash shares his unique journey from growing up in a small village in India to becoming a cybersecurity leader. He reflects on his career transitions, challenges faced while moving from large corporations like Cisco to leading a 55 person startup, and the importance of understanding and nurturing a company's ecosystem. Ash provides insights into maintaining relationships with founders, making tough decisions, and constantly adapting to changing market conditions. This episode is filled with valuable lessons for first-time CEOs and anyone interested in leadership in the tech startup world.00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early Series00:34 Meet Ash Devata: From Cisco to GreyNoise Intelligence01:34 Ash's Journey: From India to Cybersecurity03:17 Joining GreyNoise: The Decision-Making Process07:00 Navigating CEO Challenges and Company Dynamics12:06 Adapting from Large Corporations to Startups16:12 Decision-Making and Collaboration with Founders21:42 Understanding the Role of a New CEO22:03 Building and Sustaining Relationships with Founders23:00 Trusting Your Gut and Decision-Making23:36 Personal Journey and Upbringing24:13 Lessons from Family Business26:06 Influence of Mentors and Leadership Philosophy26:53 The Farmer Analogy and Ecosystem Management27:54 Challenges of Remote Leadership33:20 Adapting to Market Changes and Industry Shifts35:23 Reflections on the CEO Role and Personal Growth39:09 Final Thoughts and Advice for Aspiring CEOsWant more of Never Too Early? Find us on Tiktok, @nevertooearly1 and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.TranscriptLAUREN IPSEN: What's up, listeners? Welcome back to Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I'm Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, and today, you're back on my Founder Therapy series.In this series, we'll be spending time with executives that have recently taken the leap to either start their own venture-backed tech companies or jump into a CEO seat for the very first time. These are folks that are going to be sharing mistakes, common misconceptions, learnings, and a whole lot more.So with that, I am beyond excited to welcome my guest today, Ash Devata. Ash was formerly the vice president and general manager of Cisco Zero Trust, and today is currently the CEO at GreyNoise Intelligence.Ash, welcome to the show.ASH DEVATA: Hi, Lauren. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.LAUREN IPSEN: Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. And for those listening, Ash just got back from an incredible trip where he kind of disconnected from the tech world in its entirety. And then maybe an hour into him being back in San Francisco, I convinced him to do this. So thanks for doing it.ASH DEVATA: Well, my pleasure. So at GreyNoise, where I am right now, we have a tradition of shutting down the company every summer for the July 4th weekend or the July 4th week. So I managed to squeeze an extra few days, took a vacation to Asia, and asked a few people in Asia that I was meeting on what they think about AI. And they looked at me like I’m an alien asking them alien questions, so this reminds me of kind of the bubble wheel in tech.LAUREN IPSEN: A hundred percent. All right, so I want to start by just kind of jumping into your background, your career, and how you ultimately got into the CEO seat at GreyNoise. So maybe you can just start with informing the listeners a little bit about yourself.ASH DEVATA: Sure. So right now, I'm the CEO of a cybersecurity startup called GreyNoise. We're in the space of threat intelligence about edge devices, and we sell that to governments. We sell that to fortune companies. We sell that to a lot of researchers. We're a relatively small company, 60 people, figuring things out, but we got good traction in the market.LAUREN IPSEN: Mm-hmm.ASH DEVATA: But rewind a lot. I was born in India in a small village in a family where we were growing rice and coconuts. That's my beginning. First generation graduate. Came to the US for my master's and a scholarship. Tried to work for a startup that is 10 people. Miserably failed. And then I joined a large company called EMC and then accidentally got into security. And I've been working in cybersecurity for about 15 years now.LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. Cool. I didn't know that about you. What an interesting start to life, and then to be here. I mean, that's—yeah. It's probably incredibly important to do what you just did then, and remind yourself of kind of where you came from and different aspects of the world.ASH DEVATA: Yeah, yeah. You realize things from your childhood or, you know, teenage and later on that that influenced you, but you don't know that they play, actually, such a big role.LAUREN IPSEN: Sure.ASH DEVATA: I'll share the story later, but, you know, I was thinking about what influenced me to become a CEO. and there are aspects of my childhood and growing up, you know, that I feel played a significant role.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. I love that. Talk to me a little bit about how you stumbled upon GreyNoise and ultimately what brought you there, and why you were specifically excited about taking on the CEO seat there.I had a conversation with a good friend of mine who—she's the CEO at TIAA. And she said, it's such an interesting thing when you come in and step into a CEO seat because, essentially, you're renting. You're renting the title. And, really, someone has created this company as a founder, and it's their baby. And you're almost coming in as a stepparent, essentially. But you want to show it the same love and care that they would. But it can be—it can be really difficult.So I'm curious, what got you to GreyNoise, and ultimately how it's been being a CEO over the course of the past two years or so?ASH DEVATA: To continue with your friend's analogy, maybe, you know, if it's co- parenting, it's like one direction, but if you are shifting the parents, then it's a different direction. Fortunately for me, it's more of co-parenting.You know, I was in search for my next gig, and I was mainly exploring starting a company of my own. But I knew that I needed a technical co-founder. So I was in the market looking for a technical co-founder. And in that journey, I met Andrew Morris, the founder of GreyNoise.And I think the decision point came down to three different things. You know, one is about me and my personal journey, what I want. The second is the founder and the founder's journey and what state the founder is in. And the third is the state of the company. What does the company actually need to go to the next level, whatever the next level actually means.So that was my framework to make the right decision. And I feel things aligned on those three. For me, I wanted to work in very interesting tech that has impact, that has a small niche where we have a chance of winning, where I can actually have impact with building the right team and culture. That's what I was after.The founder is extremely mission oriented. You know, Andrew just—he's a high school dropout. Comes from a family that's been serving in the Army since 1818—like, seven generations, and he's the first guy to break the chain. So he's got this enormous weight on his back to serve back to the country and sort of back to the community. And the choice of the tool for him is cybersecurity.So, interestingly, he doesn't care about revenue, ARR, metrics, delivery, features. He just wants to catch the bad guys and be the best at catching the bad guys and sell that information as intel. So I loved that maniacal focus on mission, and that's all that matters for him. And he's one of the best hackers in the world. Understands edge and perimeter really, really well. So it's kind of—I felt it's an extremely complementary skill.And I asked him when we were dating in the initial stage, what's giving him joy, and is he having fun with his role? And he was transparent enough and said, “Absolutely no.” Like he was hating all the meetings he's sitting in. He doesn't care about all these aspects of planning and go-to-market, but he's missing doing the actual technical work.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. And then the company aspect, the company was at a phase where they got a really amazing traction. And then it's trying to figure out how do you go to the next level from product maturity, go-to-market, scaling across the world, you know, redefining the customer base, all those aspects. So I thought, like, the mix of what I want, where the founder is and where the company is, mapped pretty well for this case.LAUREN IPSEN: A hundred percent. And it sounds like, all things considered— 'cause when I used to do CEO searches at my time at Daversa, I was—those were always really, really difficult. Usually, if you're conducting a CEO search, there's typically a little bit of hair on it for one reason or another. Maybe someone's being pushed out, or maybe they're putting up their hands and saying, “Hey, I don't think that this is the best role for me,” which it sounds like it was more of that in your situation.But it can be really difficult to bring two parties in and have them kind of both take each other's hands and make it work. It sounds like you both have incredibly complementary skill sets. And you did have a situation where someone was saying there's probably someone better-suited to focus on the go-to-market and product vision side of things, and I just want to focus on what I love. And that's the hacking and technical side of things.ASH DEVATA: Right.LAUREN IPSEN: So as ideal as maybe it can be coming into a first-time CEO gig. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.ASH DEVATA: Oh, absolutely. I feel I was fortunate to come across this unique situation because this is not a board-led search. They were not looking for a new CEO. They were actually looking for a go-to-market leader, and I'm looking for a co-founder. But the conversations led to, hey, we can actually work on this together.And Andrew said, “Hey, if you want to join us, I'll actually make room for you because I'm no longer having fun doing the CEO game.” So it's the founder having the maturity to have the self-reflection and the humility to step down to a different role and then the courage to convince the board to say that, hey, we need to bring a new CEO. And all that worked out.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. And doing what's best for the baby at the end of the day. Right? So, ultimately, what made you decide that it was worth taking the leap and worth joining and kind of owning this thing in its entirety with him?ASH DEVATA: Yeah. So, you know, all of us have mental models. So I had a bunch of mental models on what kind of company would work out or what needs to be true for a company to work out. And when I heard about GreyNoise and all the context I was getting from Andrew, that model was challenged. And that model was eventually broken.And the thesis I had at the time was, not having all the basic foundational elements, GreyNoise somehow got amazing traction, amazing brand, and a set of logos that are using the product in and out really, really well in the right operational framework. So it was that curiosity that initially led me into trying to understand more on, wait, how did you get that customer?We have like, you know, 20 or 25 of the Fortune 100 companies using the product, but they did not have any TRA enterprise go-to-market model. They had about 40, 50 federal government agencies, US and international, using the product, but they did not have, like, a dedicated, massive federal go-to-market, you know, approach.So how are you able to get this amazing traction with the customers without having all these foundational elements? And you're not in a must-have product category either. So there must be something very unique I did not understand, or I don't understand, that that worked out. So that intellectual curiosity got me to understand more and more and more, and that's how we got into talking more.LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. That's really cool. Yeah, it's so interesting. I was just talking to a friend who went through their whole job search with these parameters that she had in mind and took something completely different. And sometimes it's just a gut feeling, and at the end of the day, it's who you're working with and being excited about doing it together. And I personally believe that's the biggest thing. That's probably why I'm in the industry I'm in, but it's my strong belief, right? So.ASH DEVATA: And another aspect is, you know, not—generally, you think of startups, you think of every startup needs to go to a billion-dollar revenue scale and have a massive exit. But sometimes you can think about, hey, maybe there are other kinds of startup where the rewards are different. It might be more mission-oriented, more impact-oriented, or you have a different level of satisfaction when you are working on a small niche segment.So the outcome is not gonna be a billion dollar revenue, but it is gonna be a totally different kind of exit or kind of a customer base. You learn a lot in the process. So I had to—you know, I worked for Duo Security, which was acquired by Cisco, and that is in a segment where it's got a massive product-market fit.We were selling multifactor authentication that everybody needed. Whereas, so that is the model I had. It's kind of Clayton Christensen's model of disruptive innovation. There's a bottom, massive market that is unaddressed. And if you make the solution friction-free and easy to use, you can actually start from the bottom of the pyramid, and eventually, you go up.Whereas with GreyNoise, it's not something everybody needs. So, but people that need it value it a lot. So we're not relevant for everyone out there, but we are relevant for a small segment, and we are really, really relevant for them. So it's kind of a massive within the model there.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. So how do you shift your mindset going from a Duo into a Cisco and kind of operating at this obscene scale, right? 50,000 or so employees with Cisco, is that correct?ASH DEVATA: Oh, close to a hundred thousand. Yeah.LAUREN IPSEN: And then you are working with a company now that's 50 people.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. 55 people, as of today.LAUREN IPSEN: Wow. So it feels like two different worlds, right? I think something that, you know, we're always taught to look for when we're looking for CEOs or people that have kind of had the ability to—whether it's own a business unit in its entirety or kind of a P&L, or some type of general management type of role. And then usually product strategists or product visionaries are really, you know, great to be able to naturally take on that seat.So it's not surprising that you found your way into a CEO gig, but how crazy was it going into a company at such drastic—a drastically different scale?ASH DEVATA: I mean, it's extremely different, that's for sure. But I was fortunate enough to see smaller companies in the past. When I joined Duo, we were about 50 people. And I got a front line seat at Duo to understand what it means to be part of 50-people company.LAUREN IPSEN: Mm.ASH DEVATA: Before that, I was at a 10-people company, so I had some idea. But a stable, powerful company like Cisco definitely spoils you. Think about an initiative for your product or your business unit. There is a department somewhere within Cisco that can help you. You think about expanding into Japan, there's a Japanese sales team. You want to internationalize and localize your product. There is a team that specializes in that.So it's more about understanding how the ecosystem works and then going and building those relationships and getting work done. It's almost like working for the government or working at a large university that is, you know, well-established. You have functions, you have maturity.With a startup, I mean, we're trying to sell in the Middle East. We're figuring out what is the right entity or the legal framework in which we need to operate. I never thought, you know, that would be a problem we need to figure out because, you know, at Cisco you had teams and teams that helped you on those.LAUREN IPSEN: Right, right. So talk about that a little bit. So how do you now navigate not having the resources that you did, not having massive teams? What's your first kind of go-to when you're entering new territory that just feels completely unknown, and everyone's looking to you as the CEO to tell them where to go and how to go about doing it?ASH DEVATA: You act like you have answers. People feel confident. I mean, one of the best things working for large companies like Cisco is you understand how the system works. Again, it doesn't come for granted. But if you are in a large company, and you are curious enough to understand how the system works, you spend cycles in figuring that out.You know, you can write your notes, you can talk with people, and people are generally, like, open to share. So if you have that curiosity, you form your framework. So, no, this is how business operates. If you wanna work with the governments in the Middle East, as an example.So I did that a lot when I was at EMC back in the day, my first large enterprise I worked with, and then at RSA, and then Cisco. So I had some mental models. So I think that is helping me a lot.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.ASH DEVATA: You know, for example, we're trying to expand into a specific segment. We're trying to build a new product. So those things don't scare me as much now because I'm like, oh, I know how this is done. I've seen this work get operationalized in big companies. So my advice to people if you're at large companies is take advantage of the machinery that operates there. You know, that was not given. Somebody built it. And there's so much you can learn just by observing how the system works there.LAUREN IPSEN: Totally, totally. We touched on this a little bit, but I want to talk a little bit more about you're taking on a CEO role, and there's a founder who's built a lot of this from zero to one, what it then looks like from a decision-making perspective and how you collaborate, but also determine at the end of the day who kind of makes the calls. So, try and walk me through what that looks like on a day-to-day basis.ASH DEVATA: So when I first joined GreyNoise, we talked about it because a lot of people advised me that, hey, this is going to be an area of potential friction.LAUREN IPSEN: Right.ASH DEVATA: So Andrew and I sat together. We wrote kind of rules of engagement. But the reality is that did not work out. Yeah. Theoretically thinking about, hey, there's gonna bethis conflict area in the future. How will we resolve it? Of course, you're gonna write, like, really cool things. But when the actual time comes—LAUREN IPSEN: When we're purchased for $50 billion, right?ASH DEVATA: Yeah, or people changes. Like, for example, we both talked about, hey, if I make a decision about a people change, and you personally know that person, you know, they reach out to you and you say you veto my decision, how do we deal with that situation? So we talked about those things. And unfortunately, a situation like that came into reality like four months after I joined.We were trying to make some people changes. And Andrew and I agreed on what changes need to be made. And I told him, like, let's sit on it for a couple of days before we announce and execute on this. And next day, he came back and said, “I agree with all these changes, but with these two people, can we do this other thing? Because I really enjoy working with them, and they're really cool people.” So—and that was a real situation.So for me, the approach I took was, it's not about, no, I already made a decision, or we agreed on X. I took the approach of, okay, let's go to first principles. Forget about these people. How do we want to make decisions in the company? Do we want to hire and work with people we like, or do we want to hire and work with people that we think are right for the company at this stage?LAUREN IPSEN: That’s tough.ASH DEVATA: They're brilliant people, the right people, yeah. But not for this job at this stage of the company. So revisiting the first principles on how we want to make decisions, what's right for the company, that—at least, you know, Andrew's a logical guy. So that logical approach helped us win the emotions that he was, you know, dealing with at the time.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.ASH DEVATA: And at least for now, we are following the same template, that there—this happens on a—not a daily basis, but now maybe once every couple of weeks.LAUREN IPSEN: Sure.ASH DEVATA: It could be about a feature, a product, someone we want to hire, you know, arc structure, someone—something we wanna communicate. And the thing that is working is going back to the first principles. How do we want to make these decisions? What's right for the company? And let's talk about the why, and let the best idea win. It's not about Andrew versus Ash; it's more about what's right for the company.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I think it's so difficult to do, especially when emotions are tied. And I've seen firsthand falling out between great partners because of the people situation. That's so heavy and so difficult, especially when you have people that have maybe followed one individual from multiple companies, and you establish these roots, and you feel a sense of, you know—I guess a sense of responsibility for their success at the company that they, you know, were brought over to.And some of these things, yes, you're spot on. It comes back to, this has nothing to do with how they are as a person or whether or not they're great at what they do. Let's just actually be honest with ourselves. Do we think, at this stage, in this role, this is the right person? If we were going to conduct a search right now for this person, would they look like this? Right?ASH DEVATA: I mean, in addition to that, another way—another aspect there is the size of the decision, right? It's kind of the old saying of pick the battles you want to fight. Is this decision worth this extra level of diligence? What is the impact of this? What is the resource of the decision look like? And there might be some areas where it's worth just leaving the way it is.Or you can say, you know, this is the founder chip bucket. And mentally, you can categorize a bunch of things into the founder chip bucket, right? So you can take different models, but there's some decisions where it's consequential for the future of the company or the culture, and you want to fight or analyze those decisions really, really well.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. What would be your advice for someone coming into a CEO seat, as a first time CEO, where there's a founder in place that maybe isn't as open-minded to changing up some of the dynamics internally or, you know, hearing you out. Because this is a very real thing that happens.ASH DEVATA: One aspect which I wish I did more was thinking about the why.LAUREN IPSEN: Mm-hmm.ASH DEVATA: So why are they bringing a new CEO, and why are they bringing you as an individual? Sometimes when you're on the other side of the job search, and I know that this is a job search, you kind of—you—it's a game theory, right? So you are selling yourself, and you have that tiny fear. What if you don't get this? What does the other alternative look like? And so on.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.ASH DEVATA: But I would say be very courageous and really dig deeper into understanding the why. Why they're bringing a new CEO, and then why they're picking you. And it might be for strengths you don't think you have or you're not aware of, but they see that, or it might be something else. So you want to have more clarity in that.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.ASH DEVATA: Second aspect is the relationship with the founder. You know, a bunch of people advised me, hey, you have to build a relationship. But what I would say, it's not about building it; it's all about sustaining it. And the founder deals with a different level of stress and weight. This is their baby. They dedicated their lives. The trade-offs they made to get tothe company, to get the company to the state where it is today. You as a new CEO just don't have the context of that. So you need to come with a level of respect about all your “don't knows” that happened before you got in.So there might be some decisions where you think, how the heck did you pick yellow for that? Right? But you have no idea what were the conditions on which yellow was picked. So you want to respect the past decisions because you don't understand. You were not there. And nurturing the relationship with the founder is an everyday process because sometimes they can go up and down because they're just feeling a different level of pressure.And then the other aspect is, I would say, trust your gut feeling more than you would normally do. I wish I did that. You know, I was initially like, oh, this should be X, Y, Z, or this should be in a different way. But I gave it too much of patience maybe. So as a result of that, we took longer to make a certain set of decisions. In hindsight, I wish we moved faster because I had the gut feeling.But again, who knows? If you move too fast, it might be too brittle, and you might break it. Maybe it's a balance there. Yeah.LAUREN IPSEN: I want to come back to when you thought that you might be interpersonally well-suited to be a CEO. And you said that part of this maybe comes back to your upbringing or, you know, the—your childhood, even a little bit. So talk to me a little bit about kind of why you thought that you might be someone down the line that could be well- positioned to run a company.ASH DEVATA: I never thought about the title called the CEO. For me, it's more about running a business. And fortunately or unfortunately, running a business was very trivial in my mind. Because I was exposed to a lot of businesspeople growing up. So my dad was a, high school dropout. He was a farmer, but he saw a lot of gaps in the farming—as in, like, you know, he had a tractor and the tractor would break all the time. To get the tractor repaired, he had to go to a city, so he would lose two days and all that.So he saw the gap. He started an automobile servicing shop, and then a bunch of other tractor owners came in. They serviced the tractors. And they all said they want to buy one more tractor, but they don't have enough financial support to buy a second tractor.And back in the day, it used to take, like, two to three years to get a loan from the bank. So he raised some money from a bunch of rich people and started providing leasing and financial services to people that want to buy tractors.LAUREN IPSEN: Wow.ASH DEVATA: And then some of these people wanted to buy tuk-tuks, the autos in India, and then wanted to buy cars. They wanted buy trucks and machinery, like heavy cranes and all that stuff. Fast-forward to a decade, we had a financial services company that was doing leasing and hire purchase, and we had half a dozen branches, and the company went for an IPO.LAUREN IPSEN: Oh, my goodness.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. And I was just a kid on the sidelines looking at all this happened. So.LAUREN IPSEN: Wow.ASH DEVATA: And so it kind of showed me that, hey, your dad, who was a high school dropout, who was just growing coconuts and rice, is able to do that. So it is relatively not trivial, but it's doable. And the thing you wanna focus on—LAUREN IPSEN: That’s so cool.ASH DEVATA: The thing you want to focus on is, are you solving a problem, and are you building the right ecosystem to solve the problem?And then just a lot of patience and day-to-day discipline. That hustle is required every day. You know, not every day is gonna be great. You get punched multiple times every week, but you just get up and keep walking. So that was— that is ingrained. So I felt like anything is possible, and it's doable.And then a second big aspect, I would say, is one of the CEOs I worked very closely with is Dug Song, the founder and CEO of Duo. At one time he did—he told me when I was talking with him that the questions I was asking and the way I was running product org was almost like a CEO because my horizon of the business is way beyond product.So he said I cared about things that typically a product leader doesn't necessarily care about, which is about expansion strategy, go to market, CX, and finance, and culture, and HR, and so on and so forth. And I always felt like that should be the job of every leader. Like, you know, you don't own your function, you own the company, so you need to run the company in the right way.LAUREN IPSEN: Right.ASH DEVATA: So I think those definitely influenced me in terms of, yeah, you should run a business. You should understand the ecosystem. And going to the farming analogy, I always believed in this, you know, when you're a farmer, you actually don't grow the plant. The plant grows by itself. Your job is to understand what is the ecosystem required for the plant to grow and control all those resources—enough water, enough sunlight, enough fertilizer, and so on.So it's all about that care of, do I understand what needs to be true for this to grow? And am I capable of providing those resources in a timely fashion? And it's not gonna work in a systematic way, but you need to understand, oh, there's too much of water, so I should not water for two days. There’s very little soil, or there’s a storm, so maybe I should put it here.So figuring that ecosystem for me feels like a lot of fun because it keeps changing. It's different based on the market conditions, different based on the company. But you as a CEO actually don't do any work. You are more like orchestrating. I cannot play any instrument, but I'm a great orchestrator.LAUREN IPSEN: Absolutely. And that's the job. That is the job to a T. That's really cool. And I love the analogy. That's awesome. I am curious what it's like being at a company where you probably personally know and interact with just about everyone all the time. How does that just change your perspective on how to manage people more generally and where to focus on growing and developing talent?ASH DEVATA: I see a different view there.LAUREN IPSEN: Sure.ASH DEVATA: Maybe it's because of my tenure with GreyNoise, which is, you know, less than a year and a half, versus my tenure with the previous company, with Duo. Including Cisco, it was eight-plus years.One challenge I still face every day is—I realized this about myself—I'm more of a in-person working style. That's my natural style. So I struggle whenever the communication has to be through a screen, whether that's texting, Slack, or everything else. And GreyNoise is all remote. And I'm someone that came into the game after, in the middle of the story. So half the movie was done before I got in.You cannot go back and build a relationship. I was not there when that story was happening. And my natural style of relationship-building is not enabled here because we're all-remote company, and we cannot afford changing that model right now.So I don't think I have the personal relationship that you expect for a small company with the founder—you know, that a founder has with every employee that I have here. So I do not have that. But if I rewind to Duo—because Duo was about 50 people when I joined, and we were scaling. I was personally involved in a lot of hiring decisions, so I think I had more personal relationships with people there because I was involved—I was involved in building the company. And again, it's eight-year tenure there.But here, you know, I have a very tight relationship with my executive team. I have good relationship with the next level team because I do skip levels, and I meet them often. But one thing I continue to struggle with is how do you build next level relationship with people in a fully remote environment, when you as a CEO came in the middle of the story? And everyone is accepting you with a grain of salt because, you know, you are the outlier. You are the foreign body of the system.LAUREN IPSEN: Right. How do you gain credibility?ASH DEVATA: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it just takes time, right? You can do a splash, you can talk about every plan you have on day one, month one, but the proof is in the pudding.Are you delivering? Are you actually changing the culture? Are we winning more because of the initiatives you started? Are you showing up? So I think all those things matter.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. I remember I was running a CEO search a while back, and there was this woman that I thought was absolutely perfect for the role, and they were so excited about her. She came in, and she just—she did such a thorough evaluation of what she felt needed to be done when she came in, in the first, you know, 90 or so days.And she called me and said, “I just don't wanna be the bad person anymore. I don't wanna be the bad guy or girl. It's just hard.” She's like, “I know what needs to happen. I can do it. It will be great once it's done. And I don't know if I have it in me.” It's just a hard role to play sometimes.And then add in the remote component to it, right? That's really hard. I think it's possible to— the whole process of gaining credibility, I do think, takes—it's a lot slower, in my personal opinion, when it's all happening remotely. Yeah. Being side-by-side people, they just get to know you as an individual too and realize, oh, this is a good person that genuinely has the best intentions for the company or for the people here.So you get to understand people in a different way, as opposed to, I'm entirely guilty of only talking to my direct colleagues. And I think I have a great relationship with them, but when I need to. Right? As opposed to just because, or just to have a mind meld or share things. Right? So, yeah, it's a tricky one.ASH DEVATA: And to come to the conclusions on what changes you want to make. You know, I feel it's your first 30, 60, 90 days of the company, and you're trying to ask a bunch of people. And so what you're getting is the declared feedback from the employees, right? They're all declarative. But what you do not have is the observed feedback.So—because you do not have enough time observing how things are working. So people are generally good at telling what they think you want to hear, especially when it's remote and you can't see the body language in the right way and whatnot. So I think—I wish people think more actively about making decisions based on observed behavior versus declared behavior.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. How you process—LAUREN IPSEN: That’s a great delineation.ASH DEVATA: Yeah.LAUREN IPSEN: And there's some that I think it's such a fine balance because you can come in, and obviously, you want to show the board and the team that you're here, and you're ready to make great change. And all of that's great. And it has to be so finely balanced with being a sponge and just kind of taking it all in and, yeah, observing what's actually happeningand, you know, what you wanna fight for and what's maybe not worth it and all of these different things, right?ASH DEVATA: Yep. And another aspect of that is the company's not constant. You know, the company's changing. The market conditions are changing. So it's a moving ecosystem. And, you know, I joined GreyNoise last year, and I believe the change that has been happening in the industry in the last three years is kind of unprecedented, driven by AI, and of course, all the geopolitical events happening in the cyberspace.So it's kind of, your theses are valid for a quarter, and then the ecosystem changes, and then you come with a new insight the next quarter. So it's not that the company is constant, and you have time to dig deep. You’re like, you know, constantly thinking about what is changing with the market and what does the relevancy actually mean on a day-to-day basis.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. There's a lot of people that, over the course of the past year, especially folks that were coming out of big organizations when there was all these macroeconomic shifts that were happening, decided, oh, I'd rather just build a company as opposed to, you know, going in and joining something as product officer at, you know, a company that's maybe Series B or what have you.Because there's a lot of action that's happening that's still so early in AI and at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. So, so many amazing execs that came from these big, big entities are now, for the first time, either in building mode as a founder or, for the first time, have done what you've done and taken on a CEO seat for an early stage company.What do you think the most important things that maybe you've learned over the course of your time at GreyNoise have been that maybe you just—you weren't privy to, or you didn't feel like anyone gave you a heads up on, or that have been kind of new, different challenges that you hope that, you know, folks would vet before deciding to make the leap?ASH DEVATA: I feel, you know, to constantly rewrite your job description as a CEO, who came in the middle of the story and as the company's growing. So you—so rewriting job description, meaning at a very high level, I feel the CEO's job is to make sure, number one, the company doesn't die. And, number two, the company is relevant. And, number three, the company's actually growing.So what is your role in the market? And so on and so forth. But where you focus on? Is it people issues, technology, go-to-market, getting funding, managing the board? Like, what area do you precisely focus on might needs to change based on the state of the union and what's changing in the market on a—not a weekly basis, but at least on a monthly basis. So I wish somebody told me that, hey, proactively think about your focus areas on a monthly basis, versus, you know, you have a template. That's one.Second is, a lot of people said, hey, CEO jobs are gonna be very, very lonely because you cannot provide all the context to any one group of stakeholders because they'll freak out. You know, you still manage with a certain tone the board. You manage your executive team in a different way. You manage the whole company employee, you know, all hands in a different way.But I felt that is kind of a mis-advice. I trust my executive team a lot. I share a lot of context. So maybe there's a way where, if you build enough trust with the immediate executive team, the job doesn't need to be—LAUREN IPSEN: So lonely?ASH DEVATA: So lonely as they say it should be, or it is in general.LAUREN IPSEN: I love that. It feels more like a partnership.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. So, you know, you are vulnerable. You tell them, I don't know the answer. I'm scared too, you know, about the survival of this particular project. And so you have a different level of trust. So that's—I wish people told me that. Hey, proactively figure out—you don't need to be too lonely, you know, in your CEO gig.LAUREN IPSEN: And you don't need to necessarily immediately have the answer to everything on your own. Right? I think that's a cool—that's a really great perspective.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. Yeah. And when I was at Cisco, I was having a blast. Cisco is a phenomenal company to work for. But I felt like I was getting really comfortable. And I always believed, like, comfort and growth are diametrically opposite, so.And I also felt it's a—you know, once you're very comfortable with a very large company for a very long time, you might not be able to operate in a small startup because the struggles are very different. You're used to a certain level of ecosystem support, right? So I was scared about the level of comfort and my future inability to work for a small startup, and that was one of the drivers for me to leave Cisco at the time.LAUREN IPSEN: Okay.ASH DEVATA: And it was very personal. So I would recommend people, you know, if— there's nothing wrong in working with a large company for the rest of your life, but, you know, if you're—if that's what you want to do, you should completely do that.LAUREN IPSEN: Right.ASH DEVATA: Do not underestimate the scale and the support a large company provides. At a small startup, you know, you have to do everything from zero to one, and survival is, like, top of mind. At Cisco, you don't think about survival every day. And—LAUREN IPSEN: That’s true. Yeah.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. You know, that's the last thing in your mind, right? At Cisco, I always used to think about, you got 80 gods to please. I grew up in a Hindu family. So you always think about hundreds of gods. And every god has a role. Like, there's a god for rain, there's a god for thunder.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.ASH DEVATA: So at Cisco, you have a lot of gods to please. No matter what decision you make, that decision can be vetoed by some god sitting somewhere. So you always try to understand how many gods exist. What is their intention? What do they prioritize? And how does your decision align with them?And you don't have those kind of aspects with a startup, right? You are the decision-maker. The buck stops with you.But, bottom line, I feel, if you ever thought about giving it a shot, you should totally try being a CEO. You know, I think about this framework of a lot of us have only 80,000 hours to work. You know, you start working when you're 25. You retire when you're 65. So if you're lucky, you got 80,000 hours to work in your life andLAUREN IPSEN: I like that you position it that way. You get to, yeah.ASH DEVATA: Yeah. And there's no, you know, APR on it. You know, it's not earning any interest. There's no dividends. If you're lucky, you get all the 80,000. So, you know, if you want to categorize 5,000 of the 80,000 you have—and a lot of us don't have all the 80,000 right now; you're somewhere in the middle. So, you know, just don't think too much. You can say, I'm gonna categorize 5,000 or 7,000 off that remaining 20,000 left for me to try a CEO gig. Let's see what happens.LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. This has been incredibly helpful. I so appreciate you taking the time. I think this is gonna be so helpful for our founders, especially first-time founders and CEOs that are jumping into the spot that you jumped into, similarly. So thank you for hopping on the show, especially right when you got back from a trip of disconnection. Welcome back to technology, Ash. I appreciate you.ASH DEVATA: Well, the best way is to come back to technology, Lauren. And thanks for having me. This is wonderful. Enjoyed very much talking with you and, you know, sharing my tiny context I have.LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. Thank you so much. And for all of you tuning in, more to come on Never Too Early: Founder Therapy. We'll talk soon. Bye-bye.

Ver todos los episodios