MAKING A RISKY BUSINESS LESS SO FOR CISOS
Technology, expertise, and a committed ally are the front-line weapons organizations need to manage cybersecurity risks and compliance requirements
If Tevora seems comfortable wearing the mantle of an Inc. 5000 company, that should come as no surprise. It’s earned that honor six years running. A management consultancy focused on cybersecurity, risk, and compliance services, Tevora was also named one of the best places to work in Orange County, California, in 2019.
Tevora is devoted to supporting chief information security officers (CISOs) in protecting their organizations’ digital assets. “We make it our responsibility to ensure that CISOs have the tools and guidance they need to build their departments, so they can prevent and respond to daily threats,” says Ray Zadjmool, CEO and founder.
Working with global enterprises, governments, and other institutions, Tevora’s expert advisors take the time to learn about each client’s unique pressures and challenges so they can help identify and execute the best solutions for each case, Zadjmool explains. “We take a hands-on approach to each new partnership and, year after year, apply our cumulative learnings to continually strengthen the company’s digital defenses.”
TENACITY TO OVERCOME CHALLENGES
Founded in 2003, Tevora has grown steadily, always finding ways to overcome challenges. “We have faced our share of growing pains, but we have had the tenacity and drive to overcome them,” says Nazy Fouladirad, Tevora’s president and COO.
An early challenge was recruiting and retaining the talent it needed. Tevora met it by investing heavily in its summer intern program, in-house training, subsidized professional development tracks, purposeful career paths, and amenities that make Tevora "the hottest space in Orange County to build a career in security," Fouladirad says.
It has also solved team support challenges by investing in bicoastal offices and a diversity of team locations. “Our business challenge is to stay ahead of our customers’ needs, so we prioritize staying nimble and solving issues on a regular basis,” she says.
DRIVEN BY CUSTOMER FOCUS
With a brand built on the three pillars of insightful advice, positioning as an expert resource, and confident delivery, Tevora consistently wins high ratings from both employees and clients. Zadjmool and Fouladirad credit the company's success to its focus on putting its customers first for its success. “As we examined and defined what ‘client-centric focus’ meant for us, we came to the conclusion that in order to give excellent service, we have to enable our employees and take care of them,” Zadjmool says.
Tevora’s impressive performance bears witness to the power of its strategic approach, and it continues to grow. It expanded into the greater New York area in 2018 and relocated to a new, larger headquarters facility in Irvine, California, earlier this year. As part of its long-term plan to expand Tevora’s footprint across the country, it is opening a new office in the Washington, D.C., area early in 2020 and another in the Bay area soon after that.
“At Tevora, we are dedicated to and passionate about cybersecurity, consulting, and our ability to impact an organization in a positive way,” Fouladirad says. “We take our art seriously, and we work very hard to ensure that our clients have a great customer experience, and the work is relevant, meaningful, and of value to our staff and clients alike.” TEVORA.COM
foot in the company’s office. “I saw the seeds of what this could look like at scale,” he says. Fast-forward to March 2019, when Cutler found himself on the job market. The company was now flipping thousands of pairs of shoes per day, and the staff had ballooned in the previous two years. His talks with StockX escalated. Meanwhile, he turned down CEO roles at public companies, he says, because he wanted to steer a startup.
Luber likes to say that it just so happened that StockX announced its billion-dollar valuation (based on a $110 million Series C investment this past June) and Cutler’s appointment as CEO at the same time. But to hear it from Cutler, you couldn’t have had one without the other. “I knew pretty much every investor in the latest round,” he says. As investors were mulling whether to go in, Cutler answered their questions. “It was very transparent that I was seriously considering this role,” he says.
Meanwhile, StockX was outgrowing Luber’s capacity as a manager—and his interests. Important initiatives were stalling. The company needed to fill key roles, such as chief financial officer, and Luber wasn’t focused on executive search. He was often out of town on the conference circuit. Schwartz and Gilbert stopped waiting for him to weigh in before making certain decisions. Cutler made the hires soon after he started.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, the new CEO breezes into the office wearing a gray sweater with elbow patches and a pair of Nike high-tops with the plastic tag still attached. (“It’s a personal preference,” he says; his former preference was Gucci loafers.) He occupies the office next to Luber’s—smaller, not a corner—and flies to Detroit from the Bay Area every week.
In this CEO-founder dance, Cutler and Luber have managed to not step on each other’s toes with a simple division of labor. Luber handles partnerships, IPOs, new product categories, and public speaking; Cutler handles everything else.
The only time I see Cutler and Luber interact in the office is when Luber ambles over to Cutler’s office at one point, blue baseball cap on backward, red manila folder in hand, and leans against the glass door, nodding and talking for a few minutes before returning to his hype cave. Save for a visitor or two, he spends the afternoon alternately staring at his monitor and unboxing shoes. He seems siloed. And maybe a little lonely.
Around 4:30, the lights are out in Luber’s office. Has he gone home? “Oh, no, he’s taking a nap,” says his assistant. “He takes 11-minute naps. Once, he locked the door and forgot to set his alarm.”
Luber starts and ends most days in the shoe room of his colonial-style home in an affluent, leafy suburb. “This is part of the reason we got the house,” he says, opening the door to an alcove-roofed space that contains approximately $100,000 worth of sneakers—more than 400 pairs arrayed along sleek, backlighted shelves. “I was like, ‘I need a room for my shoes.’ The best thing for me is to think of what shoes I want to wear before I go to the office.” His eyes pan across the shelves.
He can afford to spend more time in here now that he’s removed from many of the operational details that Cutler oversees: scaling StockX in Europe and Asia, hiring C-suite types, working out the complicated logistics of shipping to customers in more than 200 countries. He can spend more time on the things that truly excite him, like baseball cards. This fall, StockX launched trading cards as a category. Luber thinks they might be better for the company than sneakers.
There are 12 packs of cards on the poker table in the center of his sneaker room; the previous night, Luber stayed up until 4 a.m. sorting through them, trying to find the rookie card of Frank Thomas, a five-time All-Star designated hitter. “If it’s in the right condition, it’s worth 150 bucks,” he says. “On average, if I get two of these, and then a handful of these”—he holds up a card that’s worth less but still worth something—“I’m getting maybe $400 worth of value out of a box that I paid $100 for.” It’s not just a hobby, he says—scouring eBay and trading card shops also helps him figure out their inefficiencies, so StockX can do better. He used to stay up until 4 a.m. answering email. He prefers this. He’s doing fine, he swears.
StockX said the company does not publicly comment on contracts, salaries, or how long employees need to stay on to have their shares vest. (Luber, along with Schwartz, is StockX’s largest employee shareholder.) Everyone, Luber included, toes the party line about how his involvement is crucial to StockX’s continued growth. If he has to be here, indulging his obsessions is a fine way to do it. Better that than the headaches of large-scale management. “Before StockX, the most people at a company I ever worked at, other than IBM, was 12,” Luber says, “and half of them were contractors. I’m way more comfortable and effective at the founding stage than with the day-to-day. I’m a startup guy. I’m a startup founder.”
He mulls over what shoes to wear. There’ll be a dinner with the board of directors tonight, and a board meeting tomorrow. He’s running 15 minutes late. He rubs his eyes. He doesn’t seem stressed or nervous. He seems like he’s hustled enough, for now.
At 4:30, the lights are out in Luber’s office. Has he gone home? “Oh, no, he’s taking a nap,” says his assistant.
builds production and develops new items, from breakfast sausage to fried chicken.
The company must also fight off negative perceptions that its product is “processed crap that comes in a box,” as South Park recently described plant-based meat in an episode titled “Let Them Eat Goo.” Impossible Foods doesn’t like to talk about the provenance of heme, its magic ingredient, perhaps because it’s produced by a contractor in a microbial fermentation plant that has turned out antibiotics, biopharmaceuticals, and enzymes used in biofuels and fracking. And the Center for Food Safety, an environmental group, has petitioned the FDA to keep Impossible meat out of groceries, contending that testing of heme has not been sufficiently rigorous.
Brown argues that nothing about heme should trouble consumers—it has been approved for use by the FDA—and that the term processed is an almost meaningless buzzword. “Virtually every food that you love is processed to a similar degree as the Impossible Burger in the sense that a bunch of ingredients are carefully chosen and fermented, cooked, or blended to make something that’s delicious,” he says. “It’s useless—like food racism or something—to just slap some stupid, broad label that mischaracterizes our products in this way.”
He is equally dismissive of nutritional cavils like the fact that Impossible meat has four-and-a-half times the sodium of beef. “You’d have to eat six Impossible Burgers to hit your sodium limit,” Brown says (though at Burger King, two Impossible Whoppers would nearly do the job.) “It’s kind of like saying passion fruit has more sodium than a peach, but who gives a shit?” As for lab-grown meat, says Brown, “Good luck harvesting embryos of calves, feeding them intravenously, and, since they’re immunodeficient, making sure not a single virus or bacteria gets in there.”
Brown would rather focus on what he does best: rallying the troops toward his planet-saving vision and running his highly pedigreed R&D lab. He says he expects to double production every year, which would help him with his goal of achieving cost parity with traditional beef by 2022. That’s no mean feat, given that the price per pound of textured soy protein—Impossible’s primary ingredient but not its most expensive one—is about the same as the wholesale price of ground beef. “All the economics of everything we’re doing get progressively better with scale,” he says.
And size matters. Though he generally avoids speaking ill of his plant-based competitors—they’re all working to tip Big Cow on its ear—sometimes he can’t help himself. He scoffs at Beyond Meat’s research budget, which was a mere $9.6 million in 2018— not even the same order of magnitude as his company’s. “The goal here is we have to completely replace animals as a technology in the food system,” Brown says. “That is a huge task.”
To anyone who hasn’t been sipping heme recently, the phrase “replace animals as a technology” sounds insanely ambitious, or just plain insane. But consider who’s saying it, and what he’s achieved so far, and, perhaps, this simple fact: A few years ago, what would most people have said about the idea of making meat from plants? Impossible.