Joe Alapat Tells Us How Liongard is WINNING with a New CEO

Hi!  It's Carrie - and the beginning of this podcast starts really abruptly because Joe and I started chatting immediately and we completely forgot to do the intro.

I want to remind MSPs that Liongard ROARCon is open for registration now!

Ian and I have limited passes to share, so if it's before July 20 2024 and you are the owner of an MSP that would like to attend, reach out to Carrie on Linkedin!

Joe Alapat is WINNING by Hiring a New CEO

In this engaging episode, Joe Alapat, co-founder of Liongard, shares his journey from being the CEO of an MSP to a pivotal role in a growing software firm. Joe discusses the cultural differences among founders from various countries, the challenges and rewards of cybersecurity, and the strategic shift in Liongard’s focus under new leadership. 

Episode Highlights:

• Leadership Transitions: Joe reflects on transitioning from CEO to co-founder and the dynamics of reporting to a new CEO in his own company.
• Family and Work Balance: Joe emphasizes the importance of family and how frequent travel impacts personal life.
• Cybersecurity Focus: The conversation delves into the critical aspect of cybersecurity, emphasizing proactive measures over reactive strategies.
• Product Vision: Joe talks about Liongard's product evolution and the importance of focusing on the original vision to drive innovation and customer satisfaction.

Guest Quotes:

• "People mistake my excitement for anger; it's just a South Indian trait to be passionate and love debating." - Joe Alapat
• "If I'm not speaking, should I go? It's important to balance travel with family time." - Joe Alapat
• "Every dollar spent left of boom is more productive than spending it right of boom." - Joe Alapat
• "Liongard is not Joe Alapat. Liongard is its own entity with its own personality." - Joe Alapat

Guest Information: Joe Alapat is the co-founder of Liongard, a software firm specializing in cybersecurity and IT management. With a background as a CEO of an MSP, Joe brings a wealth of knowledge in managing and securing IT environments at scale. He is passionate about product design, user experience, and driving innovation in cybersecurity.

Links and Resources Mentioned:

• Liongard
• Book: "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey A. Moore

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with either of them here: https://randr.consulting/connect

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Joe Alapat: More of this right here.

[00:00:01] Carrie Richardson: You're a wide, you're a wide wide talker. 

[00:00:04] Joe Alapat: And this is like an Indian kind of thing. This is what Indians do. We, they get distracted by looking at hands, waving all the time. 

[00:00:12] Carrie Richardson: You get like wider as you get more excited or just like faster.

[00:00:17] Joe Alapat: All of it. And then my eyes get bigger and that's usually, and then people are like, is he mad? No. I'm like, no, I'm just excited. . So people mistake the excitement sometimes for anger. They get, I get very passionate and I love debating. That's a South Indian trait, by the way.

[00:00:33] Joe Alapat: So South Indians love debate. We love arguing about stuff. 

[00:00:37] Carrie Richardson: There's some interesting cultural differences between founders from different countries. like every time I've worked with an Israeli founder, I just love them. they don't mince their words. 

[00:00:48] Carrie Richardson: If something is garbage, they say that it's garbage and they don't shit sandwich it. It's just This is wrong. How are you going to fix it? There's no pleasantries. 

[00:00:57] Joe Alapat: You are probably part Israeli and don't [00:01:00] realize it because you just described your personality. So I can see why you get along.

[00:01:05] Carrie Richardson: Smooth my personality out a little bit to make myself a little more palatable, but I just, and now that I have a little bit of a retirement nest egg, I'm even less inclined to compromise. So I'm like, no, I don't have time to listen to your bullshit today. I got to go. 

[00:01:21] Joe Alapat: That's what happens when you have choice. You have some financial freedom, right? 

[00:01:24] Carrie Richardson: what life is like for Ian though? 

[00:01:28] Joe Alapat: Hey, look, I see a big smile on his face every time. So obviously you guys are doing something right. 

[00:01:33] Carrie Richardson: it's a good balance, 

[00:01:35] Joe Alapat: Okay. All right. I need to catch up with him. I haven't seen him in a bit. Are you 

[00:01:40] Carrie Richardson: Oh, he's not going to be a PAX eight. 

[00:01:42] Joe Alapat: Okay, I got to see 

[00:01:44] Carrie Richardson: what 

[00:01:44] Joe Alapat: is he going to any conference events or is it more 

[00:01:47] Carrie Richardson: He is only going to conferences where I've been invited to speak at kind of mode right now.

[00:01:53] 

[00:01:53] Joe Alapat: why didn't you say that? Because that, PAX 8 is on the bubble for me right now. I'm like, hey, look, if I'm not speaking, then maybe, do I, [00:02:00] should I go? Because I need to I've been traveling a lot. And so it's my wife. Had made the comment like you haven't been around and it like that one hurts, like when, cause I, I'm a big, I love my family, I love my kids and want to be present and lately there's been a lot of travel and there's been phases, at LIongard where there's been a lot of travel and this is one of those much of it has to do with beating the drum on our message.

[00:02:26] Joe Alapat: And I enjoy that, but then I also miss people. Miss my family. So when I hear that it's oh, that one hits home. 

[00:02:33] Carrie Richardson: How do we get a speaking spot at the Lion Guard conference? 

[00:02:35] Joe Alapat: Stephanie Weagle. Joined the team as of Monday and what's been really cool is it was actually an attempt to try to get Vin back into product where I'm at and it's been successful.

[00:02:49] Joe Alapat: So Vin and I are actually doing our co founder thing. We're both focused on product. Design and user experience and everything that our customers [00:03:00] see when they interact with Liongard and I'm largely in charge of the product vision and go to market and how the product is going to deliver on like the finished outcome and we've got this team of, our head of engine or he's our CTO Colin who's in charge of all the raw development for Execution of all of this craziness and then Wendy who's on my team who she's amazing at making sure all the planes take off and they all land properly and make sure the road map execution.

[00:03:33] Joe Alapat: It's great and she's the one that says no to all the crazy ideas to say nope this to hit the schedule. We gotta do this. I told her like you gotta keep us accountable and She's great at that. so I'm Really liking where we're at team wise on the product engineering side, which is a very complex dance that we have at LIongard.

[00:03:51] Joe Alapat: There's a lot going on. 

[00:03:53] Carrie Richardson: So the band got back together 

[00:03:56] Joe Alapat: Yeah, that's why it just feels like going back to the early days, [00:04:00] except we're much more massive than we ever like back in 2018. when we were trying to close our first customer and now you know we're deployed in like 70, 000 and businesses globally and 1500 plus MSPs and it's just you know this massive scale that we're at and yet we can think in terms of OK now we're going to continue to drive the vision and then deal with focus.

[00:04:25] Joe Alapat: Because with Michelle Accardi coming on board a little over a year ago. I was able to recruit her and it was a long process. during that process I realized how hard it is to hire a CEO and how Scary it is to hand over the baton I'm so happy that she joined the team because she brought a lot of focus to LIongard and taking us back to our original founding idea.

[00:04:48] Joe Alapat: And that's what she, when she came to join the team, she said, Joe, why don't you and Vin, like, why aren't we focusing on the original idea which was based on more of a focus on cyber [00:05:00] security, which was identifying the source and predicting. Yeah. Where a breach would happen using the unique technology that we had built, and we started there, but in 2017 and 2018, when we were talking about the attack surface, people were like, no, that's not cyber security.

[00:05:20] Joe Alapat: Cyber security is finding the intruder. It's about, finding the anomalous thing. And, carry the thing that I always tell folks is why do we turn on the security alarm and keep the front door open? Because that's what everybody's doing. They turn on the security alarm and keep the front door open and it just blows my mind.

[00:05:39] Joe Alapat: I'm like guys like read how data breaches are happening. It's really basic stuff, but it's lots of basic things and it's a lot and you cannot. It's not easy and I'm not saying it's easy. But we've got to rethink what it means to protect our environments. And it's sometimes it's the blocking and tackling, and that's [00:06:00] what every CIO and CISO says.

[00:06:02] Joe Alapat: But it's a lot of it because we have, even, with our business, we've got 80 to a hundred different tools that we use at LIongard and I consider ourselves sizable, but it's ridiculous that we have to use that many tools, but that's just what you do. I don't know how many tools do you have Carrie?

[00:06:19] 

[00:06:19] Carrie Richardson: that many? Because Ian refuses to allow me to 

[00:06:21] Joe Alapat: You've got someone holding you accountable to that. 

[00:06:23] Carrie Richardson: Tool wise, we're a two person consulting business. We're not nearly the scale that LIongard requires, but with Ian having an MSP background, of course, security is. I hate using a password manager.

[00:06:37] Carrie Richardson: I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns, but I use it. 

[00:06:43] Joe Alapat: Yeah. It's one of those tools, right? , that's where you get into this whole cat and mouse game of how much is enough in terms of security. when I capital raised, it was all about this concept of the number of tools that we deploy.

[00:06:57] Joe Alapat: Are driven based on innovation and outcomes that we're [00:07:00] trying to drive and so if you're trying to do really neat things for your customers and you're trying to drive these amazing outcomes, you're going to use technology to make that happen. And when you do that, every time you add something new, the attack surface increases.

[00:07:12] Joe Alapat: And then what happens? There's more security to take care of, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And guess what? attack surface is anything. That a threat actor chooses to leverage or subvert, and that could be humans. It could be a process. It could be software to get to their targeted outcome that they want to do.

[00:07:31] Joe Alapat: Whatever that is. It could be chaos. It could be ransoming you for, money. And it's sad that it comes down to that. But That's really where we're at right now. And the headlines are just racing by. And so when I think about Michelle joining the team a little over last year, it was good timing for us to take this focus where we just got really wide, like we just LIongard could do anything right.

[00:07:56] Joe Alapat: And we can solve all of these things. And then when you told somebody [00:08:00] about LIongard, they're like what do you like? What do you do really well? And it just turned into, it felt like more of a buffet table rather than the fine piece of art that I was really like, look, this is the entree.

[00:08:12] Joe Alapat: This is what we were about. And it was refreshing to have Michelle come and say, hey, let's focus on the original use case. So for me to talk about Protecting our environments at scale doing it in a way that's productive, that allows an MSP to be profitable for an end business to achieve their outcome.

[00:08:30] Joe Alapat: These are things that are just they're like, very, those are things I get very passionate about, and it's very easy for me to talk about. And so the blessing we have, though, is that Gardner. Labeled the category we were in. And so this is where it gets interesting when you bring somebody in as a CEO and you've been the CEO, there's a new element, there's a boss, right?

[00:08:53] Joe Alapat: The CEO is the boss. And so Michelle ultimately makes a decision. And in a lot of ways I'm advising her on things that [00:09:00] I'm like, Hey, I think this is the idea and this is where we need to position, but ultimately Michelle has to make that decision. And align with our board to make sure that we execute.

[00:09:09] Joe Alapat: And it's. Interesting. Michelle and I are like yin and yang, like they're the way that we think is very similar, but our approaches are different. And then I find that much like when I work with Vincent, the original idea gets elevated. you might have this thing 

[00:09:25] Joe Alapat: And then you start interacting with Michelle and then it's boom. And by the end of it, it's Oh, Whoa, it's this greater thing. And that's when I find the best interactions. When you have that yin and yang where someone is, it turns into a debate, but the outcome is that much better at the very end, 

[00:09:41] Joe Alapat: And I did that with Vin as well. And then the next day I'm like, Oh, that's what he was trying to tell me. This is what Michelle was trying to explain and then it's like lightbulb moment and then the whole thing comes together and it's like this better thing and that's the state that I'm at right now where it's like we're elevating the game and [00:10:00] our customers right now I think are starting to see a velocity that they were seeing in the early days of LIongard and it's happening again and we're releasing at a very fast rate so when 20 18 when Doberman came on board with us, right?

[00:10:14] Joe Alapat: When he joined us early on, he saw that velocity and we're I think our partners are experiencing that now. And it's specifically about creating focus. In the business. 

[00:10:25] Carrie Richardson: had wonderful things to say about LIongard, and he's always been an early adopter of technology that he thought was going to be a good use case for anyone.

[00:10:34] Joe Alapat: Yeah, he's a visionary and early adopter, right? I don't know if you've read Crossing the Chasm it's an amazing book, and every founder should read it. That curve, that bell curve arc that you see, and there's a gap that's from that book and crossing the chasm is an amazing book that talks about the types of buyers that exist and where we are right now is what I term is in that midstream of crossing the chasm, which is you have early, those [00:11:00] early adopters those visionaries who buy, and then the next stage after that, those are the folks that you can start to scale your business on and they will buy you even though the product isn't perfect.

[00:11:11] Joe Alapat: But they know where you're headed and they buy on the vision and they love the journey early on. They're just fixated on I want to test out the new thing. I want to reap the early benefits and get an advantage from that, but I'm okay with the rough edges. But then there's this chasm that every founder faces, which is trying to get to the mainstream market.

[00:11:29] Joe Alapat: And the mainstream buyer finds all those rough edges unacceptable. And so that's where we're in that. That cross to get to that mainstream market that says, Oh, okay. I just totally get LIongard. It's real simple to understand, I, and I need it. I need one of those, right? I need the managed attack surface.

[00:11:47] Joe Alapat: That's what I need. And that's what we're positioning on now in a way that I feel really. Confident about that, and we can maybe rewatch this and listen to this maybe two years from now. I'm predicting something happening in the cyber [00:12:00] security market around something that I refer to as the left of boom category of products, which is what do you do ahead of a breach rather than after an actor has gotten in.

[00:12:12] Joe Alapat: What do you do ahead at scale to either make the attempt by a threat actor irrelevant or the blast radius reduced significantly? That area is consolidating around this category called attack surface management, but my hypothesis and our teams hypothesis. Is that the customer doesn't want another tool.

[00:12:33] Joe Alapat: They want an outcome. What they want is they want to manage the attack surface. They want to take all their stress and take it from their lap and put it in somebody else's lap and go. You got that right? Which is what every end customer says to an MSP. You got that right? And Ian probably shudders if he hears that.

[00:12:49] Joe Alapat: But that's what we always got from our customers, which is, hey, I don't know this stuff. That's why I hired you. You take care of that. 

[00:12:57] Carrie Richardson: From a sales perspective, talking about right [00:13:00] of boom is almost like saying to a customer, you're probably going to get breached. And so when that happens, we're going to do this.

[00:13:09] Carrie Richardson: And the minute I hear that as an end user, I think. You guys can't protect me. So if now we have conversations around attack surface and what happens before, how do you stop that from happening? How do you make it so that I don't have to spend thousands of dollars remediating? How do you make it so I don't have to make costly insurance claims?

[00:13:29] Carrie Richardson: How do you make it so that my vendors and my buyers can all interact with me? I'm way more interested in buying that than I am in buying. If it happens, we'll fix it. 

[00:13:41] Joe Alapat: We should just have you sell LIongard because you just covered a bunch of the major topics, which is when you talk to an end customer or when I talk to an MSP, I would say, is your end customer, did they sign up with you so you can chase an intruder?

[00:13:54] Joe Alapat: Or did they sign up with you to set it up right the first time? And then I pause and I [00:14:00] wait for their answer. And they're like yeah, of course they wanted me to set it up right the first time. So then I say how much time and money do you spend on that versus spending money and focus and time on chasing an intruder?

[00:14:13] Joe Alapat: Cause when you start to realize where you're spending your time, then you take a zoom back out and you go, Oh, every dollar spent left of boom is actually more productive. Then every dollar spent right of boom dealing in mid incident, right? So you don't want to deal with the insurance companies, which they're there as a parachute.

[00:14:31] Joe Alapat: Thankfully they're there, but you don't want to give them noise. You want to deal with them when there's a really interestingly tough situation that you could not stop. But man, why are you even there? If the front door was open. If the, if had carry one, two, three as a password and you didn't have MFA on, guess what?

[00:14:50] Joe Alapat: It's 

[00:14:51] Carrie Richardson: Ian123. 

[00:14:51] Joe Alapat: Okay. Okay. You went to expert level. We would have never guessed that. Never. Yeah. That's the problem. And so do you need those systems? Yes. [00:15:00] But man, why aren't you spending more time on the front door? Because that's just frustrating, right? And this is when everyone does this, when they read a headline and they realize why it happened.

[00:15:10] Joe Alapat: They do this, but what they don't realize is there's hundreds and thousands of those things to take care of. And that's why the attack surface is so tough. And that's why I'm so excited about having this focus now on the luxury of being able to take LIongard really laser focused to solving that problem and positioning around this thing that ultimately I think what makes it makes a huge dent around solving for cyber security challenges that everyone's facing.

[00:15:38] Carrie Richardson: I think it just makes it a whole lot easier to sell. It's my, I learned that lesson from my lawyer early on. And I was like, do I really need this? Carrie, you can pay me to do it now, or you can pay me to fix it later. Like it doesn't matter to me. You're going to pay me anyway. So you only have to learn that lesson once.

[00:15:58] Carrie Richardson: It's a very expensive lesson. [00:16:00] And then all of a sudden prophylactic or preventative, all of a sudden seems like a walk in the park compared to the astronomical bill because you didn't read that contract. 

[00:16:08] Joe Alapat: It's nutrition, right? if you put bad things in your body, No amount of working out is going to help you.

[00:16:15] Joe Alapat: the reality is that unfortunately that kind of thought process is less sexy. It's just like the whole offense defense thing, which everyone follows teams that have strong offenses, but what wins championships, a strong defense. And so it's the same analogies. They work time and time again.

[00:16:32] Joe Alapat: And once everyone realizes, you know what that is, and they start to focus there, we'll start to see tangible impact. And that's what I'm beating the drum about. So that's what I'm doing now. And I'm having a little bit more freedom to do that. Thankfully, because Michelle's here to, work with the board, do the CEO stuff, which is really hard work and involves a lot of context switching.

[00:16:52] Joe Alapat: So it's something that I'm grateful for. 

[00:16:55] Carrie Richardson: So one of the things that we talked about. When we were preparing for the podcast was that you [00:17:00] would know this is your second rodeo you were the ceo of an msp then you became the ceo of a software firm and now you are reporting to the ceo of your own business what's it like to not be the boss.

[00:17:14] Joe Alapat: It's interesting at my MSP. I was one of the owners, but I was the COO and there was a CEO there. So I've had experience with this. But I'm in a better situation now learning from that prior experience it took me a couple of months to get used to it.

[00:17:28] Joe Alapat: It was like putting on a new pair of shoes. And I had to get comfortable with it. I really got to a moment where I'm like, okay, is this the right spot for me? I have to be honest with myself. After you bring the CEO in, you're like, okay. Am I still needed here? am I providing value here?

[00:17:43] Joe Alapat: Am I still operating in my 10 X? And, I got to, I took a vacation break, came back, had time to reflect. And man, I just turned on a new gear and I'm like, yes, I am in the right spot. I do want to I want to write the next couple of chapters here and I want to keep moving and I want to see where this thing [00:18:00] goes because we haven't gotten to where I wanted to get the business to yet.

[00:18:03] Joe Alapat: And I think we're rapidly getting there. and that's what I'm excited about right now. Being able to accelerate to that knowing that Michelle's really moving at light speed. She's one of the fastest executives I've ever worked with in my life. She can make decisions in a millisecond.

[00:18:17] Joe Alapat: And it's awe inspiring when I watch what she does. Those are things I could have learned. So it's interesting seeing what, lessons learned even watching someone do things. And we worked together. We gave each other critical feedback and we all do our thing.

[00:18:30] Joe Alapat: So yeah. 

[00:18:31] Carrie Richardson: That sounds challenging, actually. I don't know how I'd respond to feedback from the person who'd been running my business for a year when I'd been running it for seven 

[00:18:41] Joe Alapat: It's nine. Yeah. It was nine years. I've always had this feeling that the business LIongard is not Joe Alapat.

[00:18:47] Joe Alapat: LIongard is LIongard. And I'm on the journey with LIongard. I didn't have that realization in my previous business and it was unhealthy because I merged myself with the business too tightly. I've tried to keep those two things [00:19:00] separate because LIongard has its own, Personality and can also have a different CEO than Joe Alapat.

[00:19:06] Joe Alapat: I'm seeing really amazing outcomes with Michelle in the CEO seat. And that's awesome. When you can make that decision, which I think a lot of founders, it's tough decision to make. It was tough for me as well. But I think it's a very productive thing to consider at all times.

[00:19:20] Joe Alapat: Am I in the right seat? 

[00:19:22] Carrie Richardson: Most of the entrepreneurs that I have spoken to who hire or who had a new CEO were leaving their business. They had an earn out that they were responsible working on and they just had to bide their time and wait, whereas you seem to be really rolling up your sleeves and getting a new found appreciation and enthusiasm for your business.

[00:19:44] Carrie Richardson: So congratulations. That sounds amazing. 

[00:19:47] Joe Alapat: Thank you. That was awesome. 

[00:19:49] Carrie Richardson: All right. Have a great afternoon. 

[00:19:50] Joe Alapat: All right, Carrie. See you soon.