Cyber CEOs Decoded Podcast Season 1 Episode 2

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Welcome to «Cyber CEOs Decoded,» where we speak with CEOs from established security giants to up-and-coming disruptors, getting the inside track on what makes a cybersecurity company tick. I’m your host, Marc van Zadelhoff, the CEO of Devo. And today my guest is Patrick Morley, cybersecurity board member, advisor and former CEO of Carbon Black. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Patrick Morley: Hey, Marc – great to be here.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Thanks for being here as well. So, Patrick, you were the CEO of Carbon Black for almost 15 years and saw the company through a lot of changes. But you didn’t start out in cybersecurity. And during these discussions, I always like to start with just going way back to your background and how you got into cybersecurity, but let’s go way back. Where did you grow up? Where are you from?

Patrick Morley: I’m kind of local – outside the – I’d consider it the Boston metro area. But I actually grew up in New Hampshire, southern New Hampshire. And Boston was the big city. And I always thought someday, if I was lucky enough, I’d end up here. And I ended up here, and I stayed here my whole career, which is actually an accomplishment as well these days.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Amazing. And did you grow up from a family of entrepreneurs and – or academics? Or what was kind of the family background?

Patrick Morley: My father was a dentist. In fact, he just retired in his late 70s. And…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Wow.

Patrick Morley: My mom worked in the home, worked really hard. I have one sibling. And I grew up – where I grew up was definitely the country. I grew up on a dirt road which you couldn’t use in the spring and next to a cow farm. And it was great. It was a great place to be. And my family – my father was the first person to go through to university and then, obviously, went to extra schooling to become a dentist.

Patrick Morley: My grandparents were all immigrants – three of them from Canada, one from Ireland. And I had one grandfather in particular, my mother’s father, who was super-entrepreneurial and had a big influence on me. I didn’t realize that until I was older, until I was in college, just coming out of college, the influence he had. But he ran every business under the sun, and he used to talk to me about it all the time. He ran gas stations and grocery stores and bars and printing companies and lots of different companies and told a lot of stories about the good times. And most of them were funny stories, but – a lot of stories about that. And it really hooked me when I was young. But, of course, again, I didn’t realize that until later, when you’re starting to think through, from a career standpoint, what you’re passionate about.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, yeah. But all of a sudden, you remember that grandfather with all his stories about being an entrepreneur, and you realize maybe you’re in the same situation later in your life.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. You get it through osmosis, right? That’s true with how we raise our kids and in life in general, I think. A lot of times you don’t realize you’re getting it. And then, all of a sudden, you look back, and you realize how important some of those moments were.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, no, agreed, agreed. What was your first meaningful paid job? Do you remember that?

Patrick Morley: Yeah. My first meaningful paid job was – I was a bag boy at Shaw’s Supermarket in Goffstown, N.H.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Wow. Wow.

Patrick Morley: Yeah, yeah. It was pretty incredible when you think about it (laughter).

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure. I mean, I – my first meaningful job was being a caddie, so very – both of those jobs are very service-oriented. So I imagine you experience all sorts of nice and not-nice customers in that job.

Patrick Morley: Yeah, that’s right. I will say, though, that during college – this is – this just says something about when I went to school. But I was actually in the Teamsters Union, and I delivered beer for four years during college and every summer. And I made almost enough every summer to pay for college, which is inconceivable now for so many of our young employees who owe incredible amounts of money for a college education. I mean, we could do it differently back then.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, agreed, agreed. In the end, you spent more than 20 years in technology. I seem to remember you got your start at IBM. Is that right?

Patrick Morley: I did. Actually, I – yeah, good memory. I – and you and I have talked about this in the past. I graduated from school with a degree in computer – math and computer science. And I got out, and I started, actually, as a programmer for General Electric. And I programmed for exactly six months and increasingly realized that, at least the area that I was doing programming, which was systems programming – so it was pretty boring stuff. And I…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: The dry stuff, yeah.

Patrick Morley: Pretty dry stuff. And so I went over to IBM. That would have been in the late ’80s I went to IBM. And at the time, you know, IBM – not to say it’s not now, but at that time at least, IBM had an amazing program in many areas of their business for helping, you know, young people kind of grow and learn quickly. And in my particular one, you know, I went into the sales program at IBM. And it was a really – it was a great experience.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Amazing. Yeah, as you know, I spent quite some time at IBM much, much later in both of our careers. And I think the – it has that reputation of being able to build, you know, the skillsets of young people coming in there.

Patrick Morley: Yup. That’s right.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: That’s awesome. And so walk me through because you were at IBM for a while. But then eventually, you kind of headed off on your own with roles at smaller companies, a number of small companies, and eventually moving to your first CEO role. Walk me through that journey.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. I – well, I realized quickly, actually, even when I was at IBM, that I wanted to run my own company. And at that time, I looked at – I actually looked at a number of different companies to buy into franchises at the time that were non-tech-oriented because I really wanted to do my own thing. And I wanted to run my own company. I had a mentor, a woman at IBM who had been at IBM for many years, who actually was the first person to talk to me about, OK, well, what could I go do? And I’ll never forget being at lunch with her and her telling me about this thing called a startup. Now, you have to remember back – this would have been in the ’80s, late ’80s. And companies like Microsoft and Lotus and Ashton-Tate and many other kind of tech startups – that was a new thing. And so that put the bug in my ear to say, OK, if I can go to somewhere small, I can learn faster. I can grow my career faster. And that’s what I did.

Patrick Morley: And over the last 25 years or so, I’ve done five early-stage companies during my career. And of those five – I was very fortunate – four of them became public companies eventually. All four of them were acquired eventually. On average, those startups – I was at those companies three to four years, and – except for Carbon Black, where I was there for a total of 14 or 15 years. But it was great experience doing these startups. And being somewhere where – people don’t think about startups as being a new thing, but back then, there weren’t as many. And that idea of learning quickly and having the opportunity to experience a lot of different aspects of a business is very powerful for your career.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: For you, four times at companies that went public – that’s pretty remarkable. I was thinking about that, and there aren’t many people who have experienced that four times.

Patrick Morley: No, but you have to put it into perspective, too. Again, times change, right? The first company…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …I was with that went public – we went public in 1996 on – that company was SQA, run by Ron Nordin. And we went public on 11 or $12 million of trailing revenue. We had just gotten to break even. Just think of that – 11 or 12 in trailing. And now if you’re 100…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …They think, oh, you’re – you know, you don’t have enough size yet.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Someday. Yeah.

Patrick Morley: You need to be closer to 200. Yeah.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: So different world. Fortunately, you saw that that started the kind of the changing dynamics of what it took to go public from the early or the mid-’90s up to where we are now. Carbon Black went public in 2018, so that would have been 20-something years later. And, you know, we were much, much larger, obviously, than SQA was at the time.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. It’s like everything has become supersized in the modern era – right? – both the size you have to be to get to an IPO but also the amount of money that’s available to raise before that. So everything has kind of gotten bigger.

Patrick Morley: That’s a great way to say it. Everything is supersized.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: But you were able to raise money in those days. There were VCs, and there was – you know, there was the same kind of basics, right? But it was just, as we were discussing, kind of – the sizes were smaller at the time.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. It was the same. But it was different in that today, I think for founders and for CEOs, I think the experience right now is a different experience than it was in the ’90s. In the ’90s, the venture community was still relatively new. And while they partnered with you, there was more of – a little bit of an us versus them relationship versus the partnering you see now. I equate it to the way, more recently, we’ve seen the PE firms change, right?

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: So in the early ’90s, venture guys would be like – you know, venture people, though many of them were – most of them were men at the time and still are – but a lot of questions and a bit of cynicism about, well, why are you going to be able to make it…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Versus today, it’s like, oh, we’re going to do it, and we’ll help you do it, and we’ll do it together. The VCs changed, I think, post the bubble burst in 2000, where they really became much more aligned with the founder, aligned with the CEO. How are we going to do this together? You saw that same progression on the PE firms today, where the private equity firms, again, used to be much – viewed much more – I don’t want to say negative – yeah, negatively. Hey; these guys are pretty…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah – antagonistic. Yeah, right.

Patrick Morley: Yeah – right on, right on. And today, it’s different.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: I think that’s right. I actually spent a little bit of time myself after business school being a venture capitalist before realizing, like you, I wanted to go and run something. But if you just look at the term sheets and the terms back in – for me, it was the late ’90s, early 2000s – they were more antagonistic terms, right? You do a preferred preference with one or two times a preference in it. And the whole reason for that was because you weren’t quite sure if the entrepreneur really was, you know, going to do what he or she promised. And so…

Patrick Morley: Exactly.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: If you look at the term sheets now, they’re much cleaner and more entrepreneurial-friendly. So I think that speaks to exactly what you’re saying.

Patrick Morley: What’s interesting is you don’t realize you’ve seen that whole journey of the changes of these – the industry until you kind of start to look back. And, again, you start – you talk to younger founders, or you talk to, you know, the investors today. You just see how much things have changed. And I actually think, again, it’s a great environment today to build companies and different than where we were at. But it’s a great environment.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. No, I agree. And if you – I want to get to Carbon Black because that was just such an amazing story and part – big part of your story. But before we do that, these four companies that you’re at before you got the Carbon Black that all also did well – if you look back on that, were there certain components of your personal success? If you look back and say, why was Patrick Morley successful, you know, four times – and I’m sure many small failures and setbacks in between. But in general, those four companies did well. When you look back on your own contribution there, was there a – kind of a silver lining or a thread to the things that you did that consistently allowed you to succeed there?

Patrick Morley: Well, I’d like to tell you I had a genius plan. At the time – imagine this. When I was looking in the ’90s, for some of these jobs, it was pre-internet. Imagine that.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Right.

Patrick Morley: So remember trying to find a job then – very different, right? You’d go in The Globe or your local paper, and you’d look at all the help wanted, or you knew somebody who knew somebody. And I had a couple key criteria. Again, I really wanted to start my own company. And so one of my key criteria was super simple, which was go as small as I can – because my belief was if I go small, I’ll learn more faster – because in the end, I don’t want to be here. I want to be running my own thing. And then the second big criteria was I wanted to be local to headquarters.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Right.

Patrick Morley: Again, imagine that. Totally different today…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …In today’s world, where we are. But at the time, I said, I want to be – I want to work at headquarters. And then third, I wanted to be in a situation where I could progress – at least as an outsider coming into a company, I could progress if I achieved – and I thought I would – as fast as I could. And I kind of use those as a baseline. At my first startup, SQA, I worked for someone who at the time said, hey, I know you really want to start your own company. But rather than do that, why not use an investor’s money, progress your career and go run something in tech? And that would have, again, been in the mid-’90s. And then that became my goal. I said, hey, that’s what I’m going to go do. I’m going to do everything I can in order to run a company. I did – before Carbon Black, I actually ran a company called Imprivata…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Here locally in Boston as well – went there with funding but no product, no sales, just a team of, I don’t know, 12 or 13 engineers. I was there for a number of years and then handed the reins over to my partner there, Omar Hussain, who ran it and brought it public.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Used that criteria, and that helped you to make sure that you had a good probability of success. Awesome. And so Imprivata and a couple more or maybe one more experience, but eventually you do end up at Carbon Black. And I’d love to understand how you got to Carbon Black. How did you discover that opportunity and end up as CEO there? And it wasn’t called Carbon Black at the time. I do remember that.

Patrick Morley: That’s right. It was called Bit9.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: And I went to Bit9 in 2007. And when I had been at Imprivata, Imprivata was in the identity management space and certainly part of the overall security. But we have to remember, back when I was at Imprivata, which would have been 2001 or 2002, something like that – maybe 2002 – at the time, security was really a niche play. And, in fact, most security leaders were not just, quote, «security leaders.» It was really typically, like, a director of network security or a manager of network security, and they were typically down in a closet in the basement of the company, and no one really talked to them a lot. Just make sure we’re safe, and don’t talk to anybody. There were no CISOs at the time.

Patrick Morley: So when I was at Imprivata, I was on the identity side. But I kept looking at what was going on on the antivirus side and the way antivirus worked. And I had seen earlier in my career the creation of AV back in the ’90s. And I looked at the attacks that were happening when I was at Imprivata, and I looked at that side of security and said, that is an interesting place to be right now. That is ripe for disruption because the core tech the way it was built was built, actually, pre-internet. The original AV was built pre-internet. And you could see the numbers of attacks going up just exponentially. And so I wanted to get over on that side. I knew the first CEO of Carbon Black – or, at the time, Bit9 – George Kassabgi. I knew the investors. And one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was running Bit9 in 2007.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: And I think nowadays, it’s just – you know, everybody says that AV is dead and useless. But to bet your career on that in 2007 is a wholly different thing to do. So that that’s a different time.

Patrick Morley: Well, right. And at the time, Symantec and McAfee were just giants that…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Giants.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. They didn’t really have a lot of perceived weakness. And, in fact, at the time, they were consolidating vast, you know, areas, niches of different security on the endpoint or on the server side. And the core premise of Bit9, which is interesting, was rather than try and figure out what’s bad, what’s malware, let’s only trust – let’s only allow trusted software to run on the device. That was the core premise, and it was called whitelisting at the time we created that category. Now, it turned out to be much harder than we had anticipated when we first started off on that journey. But interestingly enough, you fast-forward – that was 2007 – where we are today, the whole concept – one of the industry terms you see a lot out there in cyber today is zero trust. We essentially were doing zero trust in 2007. But we didn’t have that cool term. We just had the term whitelisting.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: But you were betting against the big guys, the antivirus guys. And you and I, in that sense, were in a similar position because I was just getting started – acquired into IBM at the time. Not to go off on a tangent here, Patrick, but I remember we pitched the idea of starting IBM Security with the same premise, which is that we needed something better than antivirus and firewalls. The only big companies when you and I were doing this back then in the cyberspace were either antivirus companies – Symantec, Trend, McAfee – or firewall companies, right? – Check Point and Cisco, especially – Palo Alto, emerging. And so there were – it’s kind of the infrastructure players were the only big ones, and they had their solutions that were invented prior to the internet, as you said. And you were making a bet that there was going to be a different way to do it. I was doing a different bet with – as you know, with security analytics while at IBM. But your bet was on doing something better than than AV here.

Patrick Morley: And the other bet we were both making at that time, Marc, was the changing dynamics of the cyber space. Again, looking where we all are today, it’s a little hard to rewind the clock 15, 16 years ago and imagine a time when – even in 2007, most companies did not have CSOs. Most people could never have imagined that cyber spending would go from where it was, which – most companies at the time were spending – maybe 1% of their IT budget was on security to where it is today. You’ve got 7, 8% – in many of the financial services companies, you got – 10, 12% of the overall IT budget is being spent on security. You couldn’t imagine that kind of exponential growth…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …There, either.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: No. And it’s been very good on the client – you know, on the clients’ head, like you said, at banks and at – all of our customers. One of my favorite CSOs over in Europe told me a story that he had two job options around this time, and people said he was crazy for accepting the head of IT security. And now he’s got, you know, a 500-person cybersecurity team and a big title, and it’s been amazing for his career. So I think you’re right that those roles didn’t exist back then the way they do now.

Patrick Morley: I think cyber is one of the top three most exciting areas of tech, bar none. And of the three, it is the most mission-driven. It is so powerful in the mission of what you’re trying to do as a security company because you’re – it’s very visceral because you read about it every day in the news. You are talking to customers every single day who are trying to protect their organization. And so the mission really comes alive in cyber, which I understood in 2007. But I did not fully appreciate the way I do now the power of that – for me personally and, I also think, for my employees. And, again, I’m sure you see that from where you sit, too.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, I know. I agree. I always – when I explain to people outside of cyber why I like it, I say at any software space, for example, you have to beat your competitors and please your customers. And in cyber, there’s this third, you know, very random variable called the hacker that you have to add to that. And you have to please your customers, beat your competitors and outpace the hackers and have a mission to do that. So I think it’s in that sense that – you know, some of my friends who are in biotech, curing cancer – I think we have that kind of mission – not to compare, maybe, that noble thing to cybersecurity. But we have that mission of doing something that will really help the world if we get it right.

Patrick Morley: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: So you’re at Carbon Black. And maybe let’s start with just getting there, settling in and, you know, back to – did you have to go fundraising right away? Was it easy to do that? Kind of what were some of the early challenges that you had there?

Patrick Morley: Yeah. When I got to Bit9 at the time…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …We – there were 20-something employees and under $100,000 in revenue, handful of customers. Product didn’t work that well ‘cause it was quite hard to do what we were doing at the time. And I did not need funding right away, but I got there in the midst of the real estate crisis, the financial crisis of ’07, ’08 and the recession at the time. And so we suddenly went into a situation where you’re – you want to drive and grow the business. And while we certainly did grow the business, it was a harder slog than we thought. And some of that was because of macroeconomic issues with the economy globally in the financial crisis.

Patrick Morley: And the other aspects were we were still trying to figure out a product market fit for, again, at the time, what we called whitelisting. It was a few years of challenge – keeping the team together. As you know, typically when you go in somewhere, you’ll look at the team, and you’ll make some changes. But then we really were focused on trying to figure out where the repeatability was in the model and making sure we got the product to where it satisfied all of our customers and it did what it was supposed to do. And that journey was longer than it should have been – twists and turns and, again, in a slightly – not a slightly – in a very different funding environment than we’re in today. We did not raise money for the first couple years, but then I needed money. But we weren’t seeing exactly the traction we wanted. I did – over the years a couple of times, I did bridge loans…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …To see around the next corner. We had an offer to sell the company back in – I don’t remember exactly what year. I want to say that was 2010, maybe ’11 – somewhere in there. We decided not to do that, but – definitely some twists and turns. And as an outsider, when you look at a company, it’s very easy to say, oh, look at the way that thing goes up and to the right.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: I used to say to all of my employees that, you know, an x – if you draw an x-y axis, you want to draw a straight line up and to the right. But the truth is every company – there’s a roller coaster inside of that line. You’ve got some great quarters, some not-so-great quarters, some great years, some not-so-great years. And it – that’s why it takes tremendous stamina and resilience for, you know, a team and for a CEO and a founder to kind of bring a company up and through. And you have to be really passionate about your beliefs to do it. So…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: We definitely saw some of that in the early years at Bit9.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, I think you’ve seen it all. And I can relate to that in my role here at Devo – is that – is lots of detail below the surface in terms of what’s happening and highs and lows. I definitely get that. One of the moments I wanted to zoom in on – and, I think, at the time, you were probably no more than a couple of miles from my office. And I remember just opening the paper and reading about a breach. It was around 2012 that Bit9 had experienced a breach. And you, I think, did a very admirable job leading through that. I mean, the fact that the company survived to have an amazing several chapters speaks to it. But walk us through the 2012 breach that Bit9 experienced.

Patrick Morley: I’ll just take a step back. And just – there was about an 18-month period there where we had tremendous highs and tremendous lows. And again, the power of working at smaller companies is the fact that the highs are higher and the lows can be lower. We got funded by Sequoia. We took a nice round, again, at the time from Sequoia, who I was really excited to bring on as an investor in 2012.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Patrick Morley: So that was a high. Right after I brought them on, we missed the bookings number for the quarter, not – didn’t feel so good. I remember making that call and saying, hey, FYI, before the quarter closes, I want to let you know – again, great investors. This is why I always tell everyone, get great investors. Great investors have strong fortitude.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: And they’re like, yep. OK. We got it, and we’re good. We’re good. We believe in the – in what we’re investing in. And then in – that’s right. In 2012 – we actually announced it in – we found it in ’13. But Bit9, at the time, we had about 600 customers. Kevin Mandia called me. One thing led to another, and we realized that the Chinese had hacked us, a very advanced group, in order to get to a couple of our customers in particular. And that was one of those things where I had been at the company for five years. And we had really started to see sales start to grow. We were growing well over 100% a year over the last couple of years.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: Our company was much bigger at the time. And I thought, oh, my God. Do we lose the company? How do the customers react? And we did exactly what you said, which was we made the decision to go out and be 100% transparent with the industry and with our customers. In retrospect, it looks very easy. But at the time, I was scared ****less. We knew we – the right thing to do. It’s still scary. And we did it. And I personally called close to 100 customers. We called every single customer, so all 600 customers.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Wow.

Patrick Morley: I’ll never forget. We had all the effort there. We talked to all 600 customers.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: What, like, in, like, a couple of days, you just called them all?

Patrick Morley: It was two days. It was a two-day, three-day effort. Yep, that’s right.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: And did any customers just summarily, you know, say, I’m done? You must have had something that just said, I’m done.

Patrick Morley: You know, we didn’t lose one customer.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Unbelievable.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. Again, I think a lot of that has to do with – it’s a credit – there’s a credit to us. But really, it’s a credit to the type – to the reality of cyber. When we – you talk to CISOs, when you talk to him or her and you tell them the situation and you’re totally transparent and you’re – you know, leaders recognize – they see it. As cyber leaders, you understand how tough our jobs are. And honestly, I think it made us a much better company…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Because we were walking in the shoes of our customers in a way that we never had before. And it made that mission element even more important than ever.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: I think we all admired how you guys got through that at the time. I just remember having deep sympathy for what you guys were going through. But I didn’t realize that not a single customer walked. And I think that is – that’s an amazing stat. And I wonder, you know, when SolarWinds happened – and again, we could probably spend another hour on this topic alone. But I remember just thinking it sounded quite similar, in fact, to what happened to you guys in terms of trying to take advantage of a company that had footprint on an endpoint to infiltrate key accounts from a hacker perspective. And, you know, as everybody was saying, oh, my gosh, this is crazy, SolarWinds. I remember just thinking, oh, it’s happened before, right? And if you’re in the industry long enough, you start seeing the patterns.

Patrick Morley: One of the other things I have learned through that journey at Bit9 was, we were – we essentially built tech that only allowed good processes, good things to run, trusted things to run, which meant that we could block things. And what I – what we realized is that while very important and super powerful, many of our customers were also using us to watch what was happening on the device. So they would get a ping from a network device. You mentioned Cisco earlier and Check Point. They would see something on a firewall. And they would know that it went somewhere. And they would be looking for it on a device. They would use us to replay the event. Well, what just happened on Marc’s machine? So we pulled the company increasingly – we were still doing prevention, blocking things. But increasingly, we were adding more capabilities to actually record, to watch what was happening and provide the SOC team with better fidelity. And I ran into a company called Carbon Black that summer and had the opportunity – and I, in one week, had three different people, customers, talk to me about this tech. And Carbon Black had essentially built the first EDR product, endpoint detection and response product – again, amazing to think that was – there was a first on that but built the first product. I reached out to Mike Viscuso, the founder. And at first, he didn’t want to meet with me. Eventually, we met. And we really connected about what we were trying to do. And we brought the companies together in the beginning of 2014, I think that was.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Very hard to get done, by the way, two private companies coming together. I know for people who haven’t had the roles that you and I have had, they probably don’t realize it’s very hard to align shareholders and the right price for the business and the right roles for people coming in. So I assume there’s some good complexity to it.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. And again, a lot of it comes down to what’s the mission of what you’re trying to do and how do the – and I’m sure you do, too. I have a set of core beliefs or philosophies that I’ve built over the years of running a company – running companies, running teams, not just as CEO but in multiple roles. A lot of it comes down to who we are as humans. Where are we trying to go? What’s the mission and vision of what we’re trying to do? And then who are the people involved? And if you can figure those things out, if you’re aligned there, then that’s a big chunk of getting – quote, «getting a deal done.» That’s true if I’m selling to a customer. That’s also true if I’m bringing private to privates together, which, as you said, are really difficult – way more difficult than doing it at a public.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. No, exactly. And you guys – again, my memory is you guys really started getting momentum. I mean, this is a particularly good idea for the company, acquiring Carbon Black. And eventually it was such a good idea that you changed the name Bit9 to Carbon Black.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. That’s right. The Carbon Black product – small team – the core team came out of the NSA. They were actually hackers. They were actually going out and making sure that the government systems are safe. But they were trained as hackers, and they built a product to find themselves. And we brought that product from about 40 customers when we closed the deal to a year later, we had 1,200 – so from 40 to 1,200 – so very exciting but also fraught with a lot of challenges as you try and scale that so fast. Again, a lot of great lessons learned – very exciting, a lot of fun and a lot of work.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Now I want to pause there. I mean, you just had – was that your – I mean, not to get too geeked out on sales execution, but that is a sales and product execution miracle right there. You must have had an established channel that you were able to just leverage to make that happen.

Patrick Morley: We certainly had distribution channels through partners. We also had, I think, a well-tuned – relatively well-tuned sales process at the time. And when we put the Carbon Black product into it, it really popped because there was such a great product-market fit. And we had the sales distribution. One of the things I always say to other CEOs and other sales leaders is – again, you’ll recognize this – is that a lot of times, you look at the pedigree of an individual or of a team who have had the – you know, the good fortune of being in spots where the product-market fit is so strong. And not to take anything away from the salespeople, but you say, oh, my God. They must be unbelievable sellers.

Patrick Morley: My experience from my own career is that the times when I was selling products that were a little tougher on the product-market fit – maybe they weren’t a must-have; they were still a nice-to-have. Maybe there wasn’t actually budget dollars set aside yet for that category ‘cause it was a new category. Those situation on the go-to-market side, you had to do every single thing right on the…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Sales process. And if you missed one thing, you lost the deal.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: And so that was us at Bit9. And then you take the Carbon Black product in; you put it into the channel – into our, you know, go-to-market channel, and boom. It really took off. Again, a credit to our sellers and also a credit to the product team who – the Carbon Black team built a great product. But then we had – as a combined team, we had to scale the heck out of that product.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. It’s an amazing, amazing story. And I’ll keep us moving along, but I want to just get to two other phases of the company. You got to an IPO – and maybe we start there – IPO I think at around 2018.

Patrick Morley: Yep. Had the good fortune to bring the company public in 2018 – and a nice milestone for any company. My core belief is that – and you can especially see it in today’s world – that an IPO is just another funding event. And as you know, you could say, OK – you can get as much in the private markets as you can from the public markets today.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: So you could make a decision to say, I don’t want to be public. I’m going to stay private, and I’m just going to raise that exact same amount money. Maybe I’m even going to raise more. At the time, we made the decision to bring the company public, so to access public capital markets as opposed to private capital markets. It was an amazing milestone. And it is for every company because, in essence, in some ways, it’s a little bit of a coming-out party, and it really does help your brand. It had more of a brand impact than I gave it credit for.

Patrick Morley: And if you’re passionate about the company you’re running and you love the company you’re running and what you’re trying to do to help your customers out there, bringing a company public’s awesome. You know, there’s some challenges with it – having to hit the quarters after that, etc. Make sure you do what you say you’re going to do. But it was an awesome experience. At that point, I had been at the company 11 or 12 years, so it had been a long run, and I was very proud of what we had built. I’m still extremely proud of what we built.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Amazing. Yeah. I think given that Devo’s a pre-IPO company, I think I’ll have many more reasons to give you a call in the next coming years to hear even more about that. I mean, as you said, is – everything seems like a straight shot from the outside. I assume even the IPO, there – were there ever moments where it’s like, we’re not going to make it, the market’s going to close, or, you know, we might miss a month or a quarter? Or, I mean, did you ever have moments in that process where it was risky or, in the end, once you decided to go, you had the runway clear to go – get off?

Patrick Morley: At the time that we went, we were going through a transition. So we had built this big data platform that was the backbone of what we did with our offering, and we were transitioning that all to – 100% to the cloud. We had to multi-tenant. We were already single-tenant in the cloud to multi-tenant. So we’re definitely doing some stuff behind the scenes on the tech side. We made the decision – we knew we were going to need money a year out. We made the decision to tap the public markets. And the actual process – I had heard all sorts of different stories.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: My own experience on the actual process of bringing the company public was that once you’re in the hopper and you start going down the path, the advisors that you use are so…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yep.

Patrick Morley: …Good at this that that part is actually relatively straightforward – there’s certainly a lot of stress around it but relatively straightforward. And it was for us. Now, of course, again afterwards, you’ve just gone out and sold your stock to all these different companies and all – and you need to live up to your expectations.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: So there’s an additional level of stress that comes with it. But the actual process, the mechanics of it were pretty straightforward.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. And did you like being a public company CEO?

Patrick Morley: For the most part, I did. I really believe in what we were doing at the time, what the company continues to do as part of VMware. We talked – every meeting, we talked about our vision, which was a world safe from cyberattacks, and I really believed in that. And there was some tough stuff along the way being a public company CEO. Some of the public company investors are highly educated. The majority are not – excuse me, highly educated on your – on you…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …As a company, when they make the investment. Especially for an early IPO company, they learn who you are over time. It takes time. I saw that progression. I enjoyed the experience of doing that.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Amazing. A lot of other areas we could dive into here, but maybe we fast forward to within about a year or so. You guys ended up selling the company to VMware. I’d love to hear how that went and what was kind of the thinking there and how the journey was within VMware.

Patrick Morley: We brought the company public. We were going through a platform transition underneath the covers. The market also was progressing really fast with some very strong and very capable competitors like CrowdStrike out in the marketplace – and Microsoft coming increasingly into the market. And with the consolidation that we continue to all see in cyber, we had partnered with VMware for a couple of years. And as you just said, we made the decision, after a number of conversations with them about what we could do inside of a larger organization with broader access to markets and by being able to bring our cybercapabilities into the VMware platforms, that we would see acceleration. Every large vendor in the world is going to – has to have cyber capabilities built into their stack one way or another.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Right.

Patrick Morley: And so that was the core premise. That’s why we ended up selling the company at the end of 2019, I think. The CEO at the time was Pat Gelsinger.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yep.

Patrick Morley: Sold the company into VMware and became the – essentially, the security business unit within VMware. Another experience – I’d been through that before a number of times but never as the CEO.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: Lots of twists and turns there – actually, more twists and turns, I think, in many cases on doing something like that than there is in the IPO process. Again, you got to make sure you’re aligned on the mission and vision. You’re aligned on the people. And then the numbers have to work.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, no, I agreed. It’s complex. I was, as you know, on the other side of that at IBM security. And we’d acquired probably about 10 companies into IBM security. And I have to say, the hardest person to figure out what to do with is the CEO coming into a large organization like that, so that’s you in this particular case. I’m sure for you, it was – it’s very different, right? You were, by now, 13, 14 years at, you know, running your own show, as it were, and responsible for everything. It must have been a shock coming in and being a – I mean, you were, I believe, the general manager of the cybersecurity business there – obviously, a lot of responsibility and a lot of autonomy. But still, you’re now part of a much bigger thing.

Patrick Morley: That’s right. That pretty much summarizes it. Being the CEO or the founder of a company and with a responsibility if you’re running that company, one of the things that I was the most proud of was of the company, of what I was running. And I – again, I’m sure you feel the exact same way. And what we were trying to do for our customers and how we were trying to affect the world – being part of something else is equally powerful, that vision and mission of what you’re part of. But it is different. And in the end, I couldn’t make the same decisions I was making when I was running the company. I would say, OK, we were doing this. We should do this other thing now, and we’re going to move resources in this way. And we’re going to change our sales compensation in this way. And we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do that. And now, suddenly, it was not just me and my team who were deciding. I had a large number of other constituents that I had to go to to build consensus with and why this made sense because it might impact them, other business units. It might, you know, impact compensation plans for other groups, etc. So everything gets much harder. And figuring that out and then figuring out how to do it well – it is a lot of effort. It’s – I have never worked in a – since early in my career, I never worked in a large company as a senior leader. And it’s a different role. Being a senior leader in a big company is a very different role to being the CEO. Again, I’m sure you can actually – you know this better than I do.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. No, and I’ve kind of gone the different direction – right? – going from big IBM to this seat. So both directions are – you have to be very careful. And as you said, different level of control and autonomy and the two different roles, for sure. So one of the things that I want to ask you about – I don’t want to get too personal, Patrick. But, you know, throughout all this, you’re also a father and a husband and the like. I’m curious just to how you were able to maintain semblance of balance throughout all of this, if you’d be comfortable talking about that because I think it’s insightful for people trying to do these types of jobs.

Patrick Morley: We could do a whole session just on figuring that out. During my time running the company, you know, one of my core beliefs is that we did not just go up and to the right. So one of my core beliefs is you have to pick a mountain or a hill, use your term, to climb to bring the…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Team up. And I was always very focused on making sure that we knew where we were going as a team. Even if later on you make the decision to change that, that belief in always making sure that we’re kind of going up this hill and we’re aligned on doing it – while it’s simple to say it, in mind, it’s all-consuming. It’s all-consuming to make sure, all right, are we doing the right things? Are we climbing the right hill? Are we doing all the things right? And so the balance on personal – for me, the balance was heavily weighted towards the work side – dramatically weighted towards the work side. As I’ve joked with some of my friends, since I am no longer the CEO, you know, I sleep like a baby. And I didn’t as the CEO. I’d like to say I did but I felt tremendous responsibility to make sure that we were achieving what we had committed to and that we were all climbing up the hill together. For me, the only way I could do that is to have a partner, my wife, who really ran everything else in our life. Because while I was certainly there and present, work was very consuming. I don’t know that I have any great hints there other than to say that one of the things I learned over the years was that building more and more time into my day and in my weeks for thinking time…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Solo thinking time, is really, really important. And I didn’t do enough of it early in my career.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. No, I think blocking the calendar for both thinking and the balance point is the key to survival. So I think you’re onto probably one of the most important things that I’ve certainly been trying to use, as imperfect as I am at it, as well, to your point.

Patrick Morley: And it feels weird, right? It feels a little weird. You put this – that’s exactly what I used to do on my calendar – put a time where – twice a week where, OK, I – no meetings, and I really just want to be able to take a step back and actually not do something but actually think, are we doing – are we focused on the right things? Are we doing the right things? What am I worried about? What do we have to do more of? I don’t know how you’ve made that adjustment, but it feels a little weird at first. And then, at least for me, I found I looked forward to it – again, if I could – if I didn’t blow it up with some critical meeting (laughter).

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we’re in the same boat here on our efforts. So I totally can relate.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: So, Patrick, I want to transition maybe a little bit the conversation. You’ve gotten into this during our discussion. But I think with all of your experiences, I’m sensing there’s sort of a set of philosophies that you apply, and I thought maybe we could spend a few minutes on. As you step back now, as you’ve transitioned out of VMware or thinking about what you do next, it seems you have a set of beliefs that you bring to these roles. And I’d love to kind of maybe walk through those and sort of understand how you think of being a CEO and how you think of being a leader.

Patrick Morley: Yeah, for sure. And a lot of these, I built over years – some of them as CEO, some of them before I was a CEO. Again, I believe that great leaders, great operators, always build a set – a framework or a set of beliefs on how they run their business. Some of – some people articulate those very clearly or need to have frameworks. I’m a framework guy. I really like that. I have them for many, many parts of the way we ran the business.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: I think that is so important. And I actually think saying what those are is really, really important because it ensures that, for me and for the team around me, we’re aligned on, well, this is how I think about things. And so – and I have those for looking for your next – you know, your next role in a company. I have those for how you lead as a senior leader, et cetera, et cetera. For the company, I have – I said this to the team all the time – seven core beliefs or philosophies in how you build a great company – seven.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: I want to hear the seven. I think people want to hear the seven. Given the track record and how you’ve applied them, I’d love to walk through those.

Patrick Morley: Well, the first is pretty straightforward, and most CEOs, founders, most people out there could probably get, out of the seven, many of them right. But the first one is you need an aligned vision and mission on what you’re trying to build, what you’re trying to do. And it is surprising to me how many companies out there may have that but don’t articulate it or may not even have it. But usually, most companies, especially early-stage companies, have it. And in many cases, you kind of lose it after a while because, oh, isn’t this just obvious? But having an aligned vision and mission is really, really important. And for a couple of reasons. You know, the No. 1 reason is if you run a great company, you’ve got a lot of people who are making decisions every single day about, should they go left or should they go right? If they truly understand what the company’s trying to accomplish, they won’t always make the right decision, but they’re going to make more right decisions than wrong decisions because they understand what we’re trying to do. So you have to have an aligned vision and mission.

Patrick Morley: And then the second thing you do is you have to be able to – you have to say that. We started – we did monthly company meetings. And for years, the whole – for most of the time I was at Carbon Black, we started every single meeting laying out what our vision and mission was. It sounds so simple and, well, it’s – do you really need to do that? And the answer is, yeah, because you know what? Most of us – there’s a lot of things going on every day, and in the end, through osmosis, they would get it. My team would get it. We would all get it. Everyone knew it in the company. So No. 1 – aligned vision and mission.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Well, and you’re adding so many employees I see that here, as well. I mean, you think you do a good job communicating something a year ago. And then a year later, you have, you know, one or 200 more employees that haven’t – weren’t there at that time when maybe you developed and announced that mission. So it’s – you have to keep repeating it, right?

Patrick Morley: Yeah, that’s right. And typically, that vision and mission align with, what’s the value that you’re going to offer to your customers out there in the marketplace? So ours was a world safe from cyberattacks. You’re aligning around what you as a company are trying to create and what you’re trying to do for the customer that you’re giving value to. That’s number one. You got to do that, and you got to hit it again and again and again. Number two is, it’s all about the team, you know? One of my core beliefs in tech – when I got into the tech in the ’80s, I saw – my particular experience is that I saw a lot of situations where you had the smartest person in the room. And I thought, well, maybe that’s how tech companies get done. You’ve got, you know, one person who kind of comes down from the mountain with, this is how we’re going to do it. And that’s not true. And since then, obviously, we’ve all – I’ve read lots of stuff about this over the years. And statistically, you know, speaking, better companies in general make better decisions when you have a team making – helping to drive those decisions and pushing on it and debating it, etc. So to me, great companies are built by great teams. It’s all about the people. You have to make sure that you’re, you know, surrounding yourself with great people. And that doesn’t mean everyone’s the same. That’s where, I think, diversity and inclusion comes in because you want a different set of experiences. You want people who think not the same as you, again, so that you can debate and push on decisions. But it all comes down to the team. You need…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Well-functioning teams. There’s a whole set of things you got to do in order to make sure you’re doing that well. But it’s all about the team.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. And that applies not just as the CEO but a VP building a team for a department. It’s the same role.

Patrick Morley: I will say something I didn’t understand earlier in career, but the most important team in the company is the senior team. If the senior team is not functioning as a team, it all rolls down. I used to say it’s kind of like the foundation. It’s a reverse. It’s the foundation of the house. And the team, the senior team, is kind of at the bottom. If that team’s wobbly, the whole house is wobbly. If that team is super solid and locked in, it’s not wobbly. And then a lot of the other teams are going to be very solid, as well.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, couldn’t agree more.

Patrick Morley: My third belief is – and which – probably the one everyone remembers the most, but I had a no-***hole rule.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, I remember you told me about this years ago. And I’ve always kept it in mind. It’s so eloquently stated, it’s stuck in my mind.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. And we’ve all seen – and by the way, just to be very clear, what does that mean? That means arrogance or hubris…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Because we know that arrogance and hubris break the team. If we align on something as a team and then I walk out the room – out of the room and I do my own thing because I think I’m smarter than the rest of the team, then I break the team. And there’s nothing that hurts the ability to build a great company, a great team, than by having an ***hole on the team. And we have all seen this in different companies where we’ve been at, where there’ll be an individual or, in some cases, a team where no one wants to deal with them, with him or her or with that team. And again, as I used to say kind of jokingly – but those teams also tend to grow. It’s like rabbits. I mean, one day you have one person who’s not a team player. And the next thing you know, the next quarter or two quarters, you got a whole team of people. And so you got to get that out. And the best way to do it is just to say it. We don’t want that arrogance or that hubris in the company. So that’s No. 3.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Love it.

Patrick Morley: Number four is run your own business. If you think about how great teams run – and by the way, not just teams, all the way down to individuals. They understand that they’re – and believe that they’re running their own business. They’re empowered to make decisions day in and day out about how they should be running their business. And they don’t have to go to a supervisor, to a manager, to someone else to say, hey, is this OK what I’m doing? No. They’re running their own business. Why is that so important and so fundamental to building a great company? If you have employees who are empowered and believe that they’re running their own business, they’re actually going to do much better work because they believe it’s their own. Number two, every day when they get up, they’re passionate about what they’re doing. And from a retention standpoint, you’re going to have much higher retention when you have employees and teams who all believe, rightfully so, that they’re running their own business. If you get up in the morning and you do not understand why your job is so important to the company and why running your own business is so important – if you don’t understand that, then your manager is failing you.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, I agree. And I’m reading the book by Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, and he says, you want bus drivers, not bus passengers. And I think that’s kind of what you’re getting at, people that are – every day get up and have a very clear sense that they can run their business.

Patrick Morley: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Belief number five is the easiest – the fastest way to kind of break running your own business is the creation of friction inside of an organization, especially as you scale, as you go from – as you said, you’re – you know, Devo’s going through tremendous growth. We saw the same thing. All of that growth, all those new people coming on, it’s easy to get friction. And so I used to talk a lot about this idea of no friction. And the easiest way to break friction is to overcommunicate inside of an organization. What I saw, what we’ve all seen is that as organizations scale – or larger organizations or even small organizations, that you’ll have these situations where you get two different teams or four different teams. We all are trying to do the right thing and run our own business. But my top three priorities – we all have too much to do. I’m going to do these three things, and they line up this way. Your top three priorities are different than mine, and so our priorities don’t align. And so then I go to you and say, hey, I need your help in order to get blah done. And you say, no, I’m not doing it. I can’t do it. And what I saw with friction was – the biggest challenge is that we’re all running so hard that we don’t take the time to overcommunicate, to actually say, well, wait a minute. Actually have that conversation. Pick up the phone. Send an email that’s not a, get this done or else – an email that says, let’s talk about the situation, because, again, much of the time, this is about aligning priorities and getting understanding. And so you have to break friction down because friction builds up over time. Some of it…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …You got to revisit it and say, whoa. This decision we made four years ago to do blah – it doesn’t work anymore. And we got to change it – so no friction.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: A method we’ve used here – it just really started about six months ago – is a OKR process. Did you end up using OKRs?

Patrick Morley: We did at the end. Yep.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yep.

Patrick Morley: Yep. And I love OKRs. I think they’re simple, elegant.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: But many other things to do besides OKRs. But I agree it’s communication. And I’m listening to every one of these, you know, giving myself a mental rating of where I am after…

Patrick Morley: (Laughter).

Marc Van Zadelhoff: …Just a year and a half here. So it’s very humbling. It’s…

Patrick Morley: Spin the interview around, and I could do a test at the end.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah, no, no.

Patrick Morley: Yeah.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Let’s do that in – maybe I need a little more time for that…

Patrick Morley: Yeah.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: …Patrick.

Patrick Morley: And then six is leadership is at every level in a company. I didn’t come up with that phrase. I read that somewhere in my career. I don’t remember where. But I so believe it. We are – great companies are looking for leaders. One of the things I was so proud of at Carbon Black – and, again, I’m sure you’re seeing this at Devo – is promoting from within, finding great people who are talented, who are strong operating leaders, who can really scale in an organization.

Patrick Morley: And leadership is not just about promoting people. It’s not just about people who are managing. There are many individual contributors inside of an organization who are great leaders. They choose to say, I want to be an individual contributor, but I’m a great leader. There are senior, senior people inside of companies who are not great leaders, and not every senior leader is a great leader.

Patrick Morley: What is leadership? Well, if you think about those rules I just kind of walked you through, the leaders are the team members, the individuals who you go to for advice. They’re the people that say what they think. They’re the people that understand what they’re – what the team or what they are trying to do – why what they do is so important. They embody everything I’ve just talked about. If you have a lot of strong leaders and the willingness to lead, which means you don’t have – you can’t be afraid of failure. You got to embrace failure. If you have people who want to lead, the sky’s the limit for what you can accomplish as a company.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah. And I think a lot of people confuse title with leadership capability, and you see a huge difference among people who can really lead. So I value that point immensely. It’s critical.

Patrick Morley: By saying it in the company, you open the door for that – for people to step in and up into those leadership roles. And, again, by leadership roles, I don’t mean I’m leading a team. I mean leadership roles in the sense of I’m going to say what I think. Again, I may be an engineer building blah inside the product. But I’m going to say what I think in order to try and make us operate better, to break down friction, to have a better team, to do all these things. You want that in a company. You want that kind of a culture that really is open to promoting that idea of leadership across…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …The company.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Awesome. Awesome. So then what’s the last one?

Patrick Morley: Well, last one is, in essence, a little bit of where I started, which is, in the end, it’s all about the customer. We start with the customer with our vision and mission. And everything that we do, everything I’ve just talked about is all about building a company, a business that’s doing – creating some value, doing something of value for a customer. And we…

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: …Can never forget that. And as we scaled, you start to see more and more of your employees who aren’t necessarily touching a customer. When you’re small, everyone touches the customer all the time. But the whole reason we exist as a company, the whole reason Devo exists as a company is because you have a set of customers who are putting their faith and their trust in you, especially in cyber, where they’re giving you money to say, OK, help make us safe.

Patrick Morley: And so we can never forget that you always do what’s right for the customer because that’s why we exist. They pay our bills. They give us the money. They put their trust in us every day. Every day they think Carbon Black is keeping them safe. Every day they think Devo’s keeping them safe. That is an immense responsibility. And for all of us inside of an organization, we have to internalize the importance of that.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: I’ve heard you talk about these in pieces as you and I have met over the years, and I’m really happy that we captured all seven of them. And I will be grading myself in private on them. And we can, on a non-recorded line, discuss them even more because I think it’s fantastic. And it’s for sure a journey. So, Patrick, you’re on a short break now. What do we expect next from you?

Patrick Morley: Well, I’ve been saying to a lot of people, I spent 30-plus years building muscle memory, if you will, on what it takes to run companies and run teams. And I love everything I’ve done. And life’s short. And so I’m taking a year, 12 months, to really think through what’s next and also try to break some of the habits of what I’ve built the last 35 years doing, which is, OK, this is what I do. I go. I work this many hours a week.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: Yeah.

Patrick Morley: I run a company. I run a team. And I want to take a step back from that and try and break some of those – a little bit back to the think time we talked about just to get some time to think and figure out what’s next on the journey. And so that’s what I’m doing.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: All right. Awesome. I think that’s a great place to close things out on. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us on «Cyber CEOs Decoded.»

Patrick Morley: Thanks, Marc. Thanks so much for having me.

Marc Van Zadelhoff: And thank you to our audience for listening today. Be sure to join us for our next episode of «Cyber CEOs Decoded.»