THE FUTURE OF CYBERSECURITY
One aim for entrepreneur is tech workers who’ll stay
Bret Piatt didn’t see the internet boom coming — almost no one did, he says. Even fewer predicted the breathtaking variety of crimes that would be perpetrated online.
Piatt got up to speed.
His job today is to fend off criminals. He’s one of the leading cybersecurity entrepreneurs in San Antonio, working with private sector companies to defend them against cyberattacks, and he’s looking to ensure San Antonio’s growth as a cybersecurity center.
Piatt grew up on the West Coast, and he had a choice early in his career to work in San Antonio or Chicago. That was nearly two decades ago. Now he runs Jungle Disk, a cybersecurity company that caters to small and midsize businesses. He spun off the business from Rackspace in 2016 with an $11 million investment. His company since then has grown to nearly 30 employees working with 25,000 customers.
Piatt has also started a paid summer internship for San Antonio Independent School District students to focus on cybersecurity and marketing. He’s pushing to develop a workforce in San Antonio that will staff the local tech industry and, most importantly, stay put.
He spoke with the San Antonio Express-News in the Jungle Disk office at the Rand Building on Houston. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: How difficult it is to find cybersecurity talent in San Antonio? A: I think it’s easy to hire good people if you build roles that people are excited about, and you give them the opportunity to show up, do great work and do something that they’re going to be proud of at the end of the day. If you’re creating these really complex roles that have skill sets that no people actually have, and you don’t make it an engaging work environment, then you’re going to massively struggle.
So in San Antonio from a tech perspective, like a Jungle Disk, we haven’t had to post a job opening in three and a half years. We’ve grown from 12 folks up to 30. Then we took five of the folks at Jungle Disk, and then they started the second company, called CyberFortress.
And then I think we’re back at 26 or 27 employees right now, somewhere in that range. We’ve designed roles where you can both bring in an experienced person and let them use their skills, but then we’re also looking at hiring folks always, and then letting them grow and develop their skills while they’re here. So everybody at Jungle Disk, their most important goal each quarter is their personal development goal.
Q: What about the competition with Austin? Do you find that people are saying, “Oh, I don’t want to go to San Antonio, I’d rather find a job in Austin?”
A: San Antonio and Austin are pretty different markets. There are areas where we have our strengths — San Antonio from cybersecurity and aerospace technology perspectives. If you
go up to Austin, there’s more semiconductor manufacturing up there. The only major tech company headquartered in Austin is Dell. So Dell grew into a massive company, and that created a lot of equity wealth. A lot of those folks left Dell, and they had some money in the bank. They were able to go start their own things, or they would come across other people with ideas and invest in them. In San Antonio, down here we didn’t have that type of tech headquarters, wealth creation thing until Rackspace. And Rackspace started in the late ’90s, didn’t IPO until 2008. So San Antonio is going along on our own trajectory. We’ve got our anchor out of that population of folks and the wealth that’s come out of Rackspace that’s getting the ball rolling here.
Q: Jungle Disk provides security for small and midsize businesses. Why is it that smaller companies haven’t been a priority from a cybersecurity standpoint?
A: There’ve been a few changes over the last decade that have turned small businesses into an attractive target for cybercriminals.
Organized criminal syndicates will go after a large pool of credit card information or medical records. And if you could get 10 million credit cards, and then let’s say that you could sell them for 20 cents each. So now that’s $2 million. There are all sorts of existing criminal tools to help you launder money and to hire a broker to go find a match buyer and seller for those sorts of things.
So breaking into a local restaurant and stealing 400 credit card numbers wasn’t useful. Because 400 credit cards are
worth — whatever, say $80. And you can’t actually affect a criminal transaction at $80. Well, along comes systems like PayPal, which allowed you to start moving small dollar amounts around more easily. And now there’s Venmo, and lots of these things proliferated on the actual dollar exchange side of things.
And then we add in Bitcoin, which took it up another level. Because now at the Bitcoin level, it’s very easy for criminals to sell small amounts of data in efficient micro-transactions.
Now that it’s attractive to target small businesses, you combine that with the next thing, which is automated tools for these cybercriminals. If I have to manually go hack into something, I better pick a big target because it’s costing me my time. But if I can automate these attacks, and now I have a way to get paid on a small amount of data, then all these small business are great targets.
Q: How much better is the industry in protecting smaller and midsize businesses than it was five to 10 years ago?
A: Small businesses were basically buying consumer products and trying to do it themselves. There were not a lot of companies out there specifically designed to serve small business from a software and a technology perspective.
Now, over this last decade, we’ve seen many companies really start to hone in and design solutions specifically for small business because of the combination of the automated attacks at scale by these criminal syndicates and the fact that they can get paid on smaller attacks.
If I steal $50 from a million people, and I do that spread out in a whole bunch of different cities and counties all over the U.S., who arrests me? Who prosecutes me? How does this all really work? I stole $50 million,
so you should really want to arrest me. Now if I broke into Frost Bank and steal $50 million from them, the Bexar County sheriffs are going to be showing up, and the FBI probably, because you stole $50 million from the high-profile financial institution.
Q: You’re on the Forbes Technology Council, and you host Cyber Talk Radio. You’re on the board of several regional organizations, you work with SAISD and other groups, and you write a lot of articles and columns. What’s made you get out there and be involved in so many different kinds of things?
A: So, I don’t ever plan on retiring. It’s not like I’m going to have a career for a part of my life, and then I’m going to give back after retiring. Even working for larger organizations, I did a lot of internal civic engagement where I would mentor folks, do internal talks and things like that inside the company.
Here in a small business, I can get plugged in and engaged with the community. So instead of maybe running an internal program for employees, we are running a internship program at SAISD now. And I’m serving on a technology board there to try to help them figure out how to make education modern. So as the kids are learning in school, when they go to the workplace, they’re like, “I already know how to do this — because it’s the same way I was turning homework in.”
This ties back into the employment piece of things. If you’re out there, engaged and proactive, then the schools want to give the kids opportunities to learn things that’s going to allow them to get jobs and a good career and have a good life. So if I get involved with the schools, I can have an impact civically, and it also benefits us as a business.
Q: What could San Antonio be
doing better to educate and develop tech talent?
A: At a city and county level, from a funding perspective, we’ve got massive disparity still between all of our 17 school districts. This is super frustrating to see. And some of this is getting addressed by the districts themselves by offering charter programs. They’re no longer locked into a school based on where they live. They can attend schools anywhere in the city. Transportation is an issue. I would love to see kids have equal opportunity to get access to a great cyber program regardless of where they happen to live inside of the city. So the city and county could have funding to solve transportation issues, or to get to where all 17 districts could have cyber programs and Cyber Patriot teams. We’re not there yet.
No, I think from a government perspective,
they’re doing a good job. I’d still think that always more can get done. If I can pick my one thing, it would just be — all of the 300,000 kids who live in San Antonio and go to our schools have equal access to an amazing education regardless of what street they live on.
Q: Is there a world in which San Antonio could successfully support a significant tech industry?
A: Yeah. From a cybersecurity perspective, we’re already doing an amazing job here. If you look at San Antonio a decade from now, I think we’ll continue to be the cybersecurity leader in the state of Texas. We’ll really see some growth and expansion on the cybersecurity side of things. I wouldn’t be surprised within the next decade to see more Fortune 500 companies opening up a cybersecurity office here in San Antonio. They may not be bringing a broad corporate workforce here, but opening up
and running a 25- to 100-employee kind of cybersecurity office. We’ll see more of that.
If we look at San Antonio’s economy, it looks a lot like Columbus, Ohio, or Nashville or a bunch of these other cities kind of in our same strata. You see many of these cities doing the same things, like Nashville has got their own version of Sixth Street, like out of Austin. And they are doing things to attract the millennial workforce and be tech worker-friendly. All of these cities are all doing this. The tech economies are growing in all of them because tech is becoming just a larger portion of our economy.
If we don’t grow tech workers here, then our economy is going to be broken and shrinking because that’s going to be the growing portion of the economy. It’s either going to happen or we’re going to have a broken city.
Q: What’s going to happen with Jungle Disk in the next five to 10 years?
A: It’s funny. I talk to folks inside the tech world, the bubble I live in. And they’re like, “I can’t believe you do backup software. Everyone’s already got that.” That’s not actually the truth. Only about 1 out of 3 small businesses have backup software. So either from Jungle Disk or one of our competitors, they’re doing a regular, scheduled backup of their information. So 2 out of 3, maybe they’ve got a little USB drive and they plug in it every once in a while to copy some stuff. If it’s an important document, they’re like, “I better email that to myself.” So I think there’s still a lot of opportunity for our business and our market to grow. There’s just a lot of small businesses that are still not using our products.