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From SOC to CEO, and Learning from Failure to Find Success
193 Plays11 days ago
Quinnlan Varcoe, founder of Blueberry Security, joins the show for a raw conversation about building a security startup!
Quinn takes us through her wild ride from SOC analyst to founder - including how she shut down her business only to relaunch it stronger than ever.
George K and George A talk to Quinn about:
- Finding your true product-market fit in the security services space
- The brutal reality of B2B sales cycles (hint: they're WAY longer than you think)
- How literally ONE client call changed everything while she was recovering from surgery
- Her narrative-based approach to security operations training
Plus, Quinn opens up about her experience as a trans founder in cybersecurity, navigating both professional challenges and today's political climate.
This episode is PACKED with insights for founders, security practitioners, and anyone interested in the human side of building something from scratch.
---------------
🏳️🌈 Pride Month is just around the corner! We're once again running our t-shirt campaign to raise money for scholarships for LGBTQ+ students in cybersecurity programs.
In the month of June, all profits from any Pride gear purchased from the BKBT Swag Store will be donated.
Set your reminders for June, and check out the collection: https://bkbtpodcast.shop/
Recommended
Transcript
The Myth of a Single Client Business
00:00:00
Speaker
I thought I could just be like, hey, everybody, I'm opening up a sock. Come be my client. And, you know, I was thinking, oh, I only need like one client to survive. Like if if it's like a 2000 point client and they all pay me and a certain amount of dollars per endpoint, then I can just have one client and I'll do my own thing. And I'll be like, this is great. I have my own business and blah, blah, blah.
00:00:21
Speaker
And I realized that that was like, i like you know, like we were talking about, like, um Very naive it because i didn't understand how B2B sales works. It's not that simple.
00:00:36
Speaker
You don't just, you know, send a few cold emails and say, hey, buy my software or buy my services. Like people don't buy that way. And so the reason I shut down, despite having millions of views on LinkedIn and a ton of of attention online,
00:00:55
Speaker
I just didn't know how to do sales and marketing successfully. I just got lucky, to be completely honest. And um from that point on, I tried to pivot and like learn from the people reaching out to me because some people would reach out and be like, hey, I do sales. do you want to learn how to do sales? And I'd be like, fuck yeah. I don't know anything
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:01:14
Speaker
about sales. Please keep everything out.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yo, yo, it's the show. This is Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks, the cybersecurity podcast that tackles the human side of the industry. i am George Kay with the vendor side. And I'm George a A., Chief Information Security Officer.
00:01:34
Speaker
And today our guest is Quinlan Varko. She is the founder and CEO of Blueberry Security. And we use this time to get into her practitioner background and understand that flip, that moment from practitioner expertise into founder mode and all of the lessons that she has learned along the way, including the failures.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, she is ah really inspiring the sense that she is a pure security operations person. I love that kind of like practitioner grit. And she has a problem-solving approach. I think you know it's kind of smart how she's ah captured the methodology of teaching cybersecurity to operators and to future operators.
00:02:18
Speaker
um I think there's some pretty good insightful stuff in here for so for folks who are maybe working in a SOC right now and think maybe they could do something better someday.
From Security Operations to Entrepreneurship
00:02:25
Speaker
i think this is the episode for you. Yeah, entrepreneurial grit and ah Quinn dialed in from but Japan, which is where she is living as what I guess could generously be called a trans refugee from changing laws in the United States. And so we do touch on that towards the end.
00:02:44
Speaker
But ah yeah, let's turn it over to Quinn. Quinn Lynn Varko, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. We have talked a lot. It's been a juggle of time zones because you're in Japan. We're over here on the East Coast, but we are glad to have you.
00:03:01
Speaker
And you being with technically the vendor side means that the CISO will get first crack. so George, take it away.
00:03:10
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks, George. Yeah, Quinn. So first of all, welcome to the show. It's good we finally get this thing going together. If I were recall back, you actually landed on our radar a few months ago, um actually when you just were kind of like starting to push a little bit more marketing for your startup.
00:03:27
Speaker
And i remember happening across it one night and just, it was just curious about it. I think I like, I left some like some dumb comment or something like that. And yeah, I think you you kind replied to it. And then I remember just like, this is interesting. Let's see, like, let's see what happens with this thing where she takes it.
00:03:46
Speaker
And, ah you know, I think you're still you're still doing some pretty cool things out there. And and based on your background, I guess where to begin is, is. How do you go from working a lot of like functional security operations roles, which you know are kind of like the heart of cybersecurity, in my opinion, working in SOX, working in more defer, working in C-Serve type roles.
00:04:08
Speaker
How do you go from that to suddenly at year five, year six in your career decide, okay, I'm gonna become a founder now. I mean, cause it's typically a few years later on in the timeline, people get that role, but like what struck you right now and how did you see that opportunity?
Startup Experience and Self-Realization
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah. So for me, my family has always been like, oh, yeah, you should run your own business one day. Like, but you know, doing your own thing is always it's always better. And, um you know, I wasn't really buying it from them. But I think, um you know, I was always the type of person to take the first job thrown my way.
00:04:42
Speaker
And luckily, that resulted in me working in Fortune 50 companies and yeah and eventually led to me getting a bunch of SANS certifications and and having really awesome professional background.
00:04:53
Speaker
But um eventually, I ended up working at a startup that I had no idea on the background of the company because I just said yes to the job without, you know, I needed a job.
00:05:04
Speaker
And when I started working there, I realized that basically I was the most senior person at that company. i was promoted from tier one SOC analyst to SOC lead and then to SOC manager within like two months.
00:05:20
Speaker
So I um went from kind of being like, oh, I'm not that experienced yet. You know, I don't really know what's going on to realizing. you know what years of experience don't really matter because I can do this better than anyone else at this company.
00:05:33
Speaker
And, um, I think when I was in that position, it really opened up my eyes to, to running a business because I was already doing everything.
Motivation and Cybercrime Background
00:05:43
Speaker
i was already the most senior person, the CEO, he was like never around. And, um, you know, I was managing the sock, but then we had the threat intelligence team and we had the, um,
00:05:55
Speaker
security engineering team. And even though they didn't fully report to me, I was really the person they report to because I was their biggest customer ah or their only customer, really.
00:06:06
Speaker
um And so I was leading a team of like 25 people at, think, or years old. And, um you know, I've been doing SOC my whole career.
00:06:18
Speaker
i originally got into this because I was involved in some cybercrime when I was on exchange in Europe. And i I learned, you doing the crime is actually not that profitable and is a huge risk. So I just was like, I'm never going to do that again. And I came home, got a job SOC.
00:06:36
Speaker
ah And then, yeah, and then did that ever since. And then from that point, I was like, okay, you know what? I don't like my boss. I'm just going to do this myself.
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, I guess people do qui to tend to quit bad managers. That's certainly a thing. So you took us to this moment where you made this decision for yourself, Quinn, like, oh, I have this confidence. I think I can do this.
00:06:59
Speaker
So now let's go to that next step, which is like, all right, you jumped into the deep end of the pool and you're like, day one, I'm running this business. Like talk a little bit about the confidence to start that and then the experience of standing it up.
Learning Sales and Marketing
00:07:17
Speaker
Sure, yeah. So I think a lot of people will tell you like first time founders kind of have this like um arrogance or like they're they're way overconfident more than they should be.
00:07:28
Speaker
I didn't really know what I was doing. i had the technical background. I was like, I'm sure I can figure out sales and marketing. um I first launched November of 2022. It wasn't until September 2023 where I figured out how to do sales and marketing at all in any capacity.
00:07:46
Speaker
And um so that first stretch of time, i was just doing, i was experimenting. I was trying a bunch of rails random sales and marketing techniques, and I just couldn't figure out anything that worked.
00:07:58
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, I stumbled across a LinkedIn post that was, it was like, this is how I socially engineered LinkedIn to get my my first post to get 21 million views.
00:08:10
Speaker
And he like literally broke down line by line. This is how you like use the LinkedIn algorithm to grow your business. And, you know, I thought that was bullshit, but I was like, fuck it, I'll give it a try.
00:08:21
Speaker
And so I did that. And, um you know, I got 300,000 views on my first post. And from then on, my business has just been growing nonstop. And actually, I have more leads and more business than I know to do with. i actually lose track of the leads I have.
00:08:41
Speaker
Oh, well, that is ah great problem to have. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So let's kind of look at like, where did you find you really still were able to take what you were doing? Because to run an organization, ah particularly if you're gonna take that kind of service-based organization in a founder role.
00:09:02
Speaker
And mind you, I run um a security, like ah essentially sort of a security consulting practice out of a law firm as well. That's like a second job for me. So I kind of have a bit of an idea and in terms of like,
00:09:15
Speaker
how to set, we'll say operational methodology, how to set delivery methodology, how to set like templating on reporting, how to kind of figure out how there should be structure in terms of client interactions. And as I'm sure, you know, coming from the SOC, like,
00:09:31
Speaker
When I was in SOC world, was always a differentiation between you were non-customer facing and you were customer facing, right? Could they put you in front of the client and actually talk about like, here's the incident, here's the issue, here's what we need you to do versus like some of the more junior folks who just can't, they're not ready to represent the company.
00:09:50
Speaker
What is your training methodology when you hire new consultants or is it all just an organization of ICs where you're finding people who are already experienced and you can just throw them right into a contract right away? Like, how do you approach this?
Business Model and Training Approach
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah, so i'm I'm lucky to have a very strong professional network. um But I guess the way that my business works is i don't run a traditional like MDR service or like, you know, SOC as a service type thing.
00:10:17
Speaker
What I do specifically is insourcing. So like a lot of companies will be like, we have a, you know, an external MDR provider, we're I'm sure you've heard this a million times, um rmdr our provider sucks and they like they miss things and the tickets are a pain in the ass to deal with and it doesn't really give us any value.
00:10:37
Speaker
So that's my differentiator, first of all, is we help you build your own stock. ah Because I've done it at the enterprise level at various Fortune 50 companies, this is where I found myself most comfortable in a business development standpoint.
00:10:54
Speaker
um Now, what that means for me, um I'm used to training people. So I spend a lot of my time training um staff of my customers, but my direct staff usually are very senior people.
00:11:08
Speaker
um you know I launched why and launched in September, but then I shut my business down and relaunched in 2025. When I relaunched in January, like I said, we've had a massive amount of interest.
00:11:20
Speaker
But we're still early stages. And so I'm using a lot of contractors to deliver the work, but I have like a very loyal set of people who deliver for me.
00:11:30
Speaker
And those people, um every single one of them is going to have like 10 to 15 years of experience in DFIR and security operations yeah like so So my staff are pretty senior.
00:11:42
Speaker
um I guess the way we approach training new people is like, I like to look at investigations like you're painting a picture, right? Like you are a storyteller.
00:11:52
Speaker
You want to tell the client, this is what happened. You know, like we think you got hacked because X, Y, Z, or this absolutely was a false positive. Here's why. And we're going to tune it out.
00:12:04
Speaker
And I think that like, if we can get everybody in the industry to keep in mind that we're we're telling a story to to help a company through a crisis or to you know to tune things out of the sim, then it really makes our lives a lot easier.
00:12:21
Speaker
And so that's that's really what I focus on when I'm teaching is like, how do you how do you tell that story versus like, how do you just versus like, okay, we're just going to like close false positive, close the ticket, move on. um And I think that like, if I, if you train people that way, I think anybody, and I mean, truly anybody can be a tier one SOC analyst and even a tier two, it's, it's, I don't think it's considerably more advanced. And the the training methods that I use are assuming that the people I work with are intelligent enough to do this on their own.
00:12:54
Speaker
um It's, I guess key parts of that is trust your staff and two, when you hire people, don't hire based on what they know, based on their deductive reasoning capabilities, more so than like, I know what malware is.
00:13:12
Speaker
Yeah, i think I think what I like about that is you adopt like a narrative-based approach, which I think is kind of like a very human way of teaching a technical field. I think there's a lot more to explore there, but we'll hand over to George.
Business Failure and Relaunch
00:13:25
Speaker
Okay.
00:13:25
Speaker
Yeah. So, Quinn, it's like you're reading my show notes. So you mentioned briefly there that you shut down the business and that you reopened the business. And I want to explore that because one of the things that caught my eye in my feed is that you were very sort of open and transparent about that pivot.
00:13:43
Speaker
So from that business owner perspective, can you walk us through, you know, what did you go to market with? What did you realize was the misalignment? And like, how did you make those decisions? Because like you said, we have this perception that founders are, you know, there's a lot of hubris, there but then we also have this perception that it's all up and to the right.
00:14:04
Speaker
Like you start a business and you just Grab that rocket ship emoji all the way to success. Right. um But obviously there are bumps along the way. So if you can walk us through that, that would also be wonderful.
00:14:16
Speaker
Yeah, there's so many bumps. So the reason that i shut down, um it's because I underestimated how long sales cycles were. i thought I could just be like, hey, everybody, I'm opening up a sock.
00:14:30
Speaker
come be my client. And, you know, I was thinking, oh, I only need like one client to survive. Like if if it's like a 2000 point client and they all pay me and a certain amount of dollars per endpoint, then I can just have one client and I'll do my own thing. And I'll be like, this is great. I have my own business and blah, blah, blah.
00:14:46
Speaker
And I realized that that was like, i like you know, like we were talking about, like, um Very naive it because i didn't understand how B2B sales works. It's not that simple.
00:15:01
Speaker
You don't just, you know, send a few cold emails and say, hey, buy my software or buy my services. Like people don't buy that way. And so the reason I shut down, despite having millions of views on LinkedIn and a ton of of attention online,
00:15:20
Speaker
I just didn't know how to do sales and marketing successfully. I just got lucky, to be completely honest. And um from that point on, I tried to pivot and like learn from the people reaching out to me because some people would reach out and be like, hey, I do sales. do you want to learn how to do sales? And I'd be like, fuck yeah. I don't know anything about sales. Please teach me everything you know.
00:15:45
Speaker
um um Hey, listeners, this June, we will once again be supporting Pride Month with our T-shirt campaign to raise money for scholarships for LGBTQ plus students in cybersecurity programs, both graduate and undergrad.
00:16:02
Speaker
In the month of June, all profits from any Pride gear purchased from the BKBT swag store will be donated. That's all profits. Last year, we put this together in a hurry and we still managed to donate a thousand dollars.
00:16:14
Speaker
This year, we are looking to do a lot more. Why? Because this year is not like last year. Queer communities are facing backlash and corporations are shrinking back into the shadows.
00:16:26
Speaker
To that we say, that noise. We've never feared a fight for just causes. And we believe hiding is just pre-surrender. So set your calendar reminders to start shopping in June.
00:16:39
Speaker
Check out the link to the store in the show notes. I appreciate that humility. I appreciate you being able to say like that you had this naivete and then, you know, it just came and bit you.
00:16:53
Speaker
But it takes a lot. I always say that it takes a lot of hubris to start something, right? Because you just have to be convinced that you have a way that other people haven't.
00:17:05
Speaker
But it but then once you start, it's all humble pie. Right. If you don't have the humility to fall on your face and then like pivot quickly instead of just like, no, my way or the highway.
00:17:16
Speaker
Like those are startups that don't succeed. Right. Because um to adapt the Mike Tyson quote. Right. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face by the market. So, um yeah, that's interesting. So then walk us right up to that point where you were like, where did you feel comfortable doing?
00:17:32
Speaker
enough to relaunch? Like what was that decision making process like? Yeah. So, so I guess I should say when I first launched my business, like I had actually quit my day job and I was like, Oh, I just need like three months. I'll figure it out in three months, whatever.
00:17:47
Speaker
And I did not figure it out in three months. And so I ran out of runway and, um, and I ended up taking a day job and shutting down and sorry, what was your exact question? want to make sure I had it.
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, just like where you realized like, okay, this is the fit. Like how is the, take me to the moment where you were like, okay, now I'm ready to relaunch. I got focus. I know what I'm going to hit. Like this is what I'm going to target.
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I took that day job and I was thinking like, um Oh, I guess my business failed. i maybe I can run it because I tried to tell them that I was still running my business and they thought they said it was OK. And then they were like, never mind.
00:18:25
Speaker
And so all i did was I took the existing people that I met over the course of those few months and tried to convert those leads into sales.
00:18:36
Speaker
And ah I, to be honest, my conversion rate was absolutely horrible. I think I had like 50 leads the first time I did this and only like one of them converted or two of them.
00:18:47
Speaker
You know, it was, no, actually I think it was like a total of four, four that converted. So I had, you know, I had a handful of clients, but I didn't, you know, I didn't realize how, how slow it would be. It took 18 months for one for like, and they all closed at the same time, like 18 months later.
00:19:02
Speaker
And so, Yeah. And so I shut down. i was like, fuck, I failed. I guess I'm not doing this anymore. i i took a day job because I had to take care of my, you know, I'm married and I have a mortgage and I have to take care of
Product-Market Fit Confirmation
00:19:15
Speaker
those things. um So I took the day job and...
00:19:20
Speaker
One day, one of my clients calls me and he's like, hey, um I need you to fly out to D.C. ah We have an incident and we need you boots on the ground to be the incident commander.
00:19:33
Speaker
And um at the time i had just had surgery. I'm trans and I had um three inches of collarbone removed and I had my ribs reshaped.
00:19:44
Speaker
um So i have like more of a figure. And I was like throwing up, but I was like, holy shit, this is this is it. So so I had I had my friend wheel me around in a wheelchair, take me to the airport and fly out to see that client.
00:20:00
Speaker
And um we ended up doing like. our first like $40,000 of business with this client just between the incident. And then ah with that same guy, who we ended up having a stock transformation engagement as well.
00:20:15
Speaker
And um yeah, that opened up my eyes. I was like, wait, it works. And I know what I'm doing. um But that, you know, that first client kind of reshaped it. That kind of told me, OK, this is the product market fit that I have that works for me.
00:20:32
Speaker
You know, I know how to do the enterprise sock stuff. I can sell it easily. i just have to keep you in mind the sales cycles. And so now I've relaunched and i'm like, OK, I'm going to do it again. All right. That's awesome. Thank you.
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah, that tends to make a lot more sense because I think if you don't learn from kind of your first hiccups, then you end up in just a cycle of repeated behavior and just doesn't work out.
AI's Impact on Cybersecurity
00:20:56
Speaker
So it's good on you for recognizing like where you need to pivot and then kind of making that change.
00:21:01
Speaker
um There's something really to be said about like product market fit, especially in the services game. So how do you see yourself kind of staying like outside of this network of senior people that you have, which obviously is like a really huge value. And I think that's like probably a unique value prop for your approach to servicing is that you have these senior people come work with you.
00:21:24
Speaker
But how do you see kind of like the quote unquote AI efficiency wave impacting your business, particularly like as George and I were talking about before before we went on the air,
00:21:35
Speaker
CrowdStrike with their recent 5% layoff across the organization, even though they're showing high numbers of profitability, Meta is showing the same type of behavior as well. Other organizations are going through similar things. I i really predict this is going to be the the beginning of another wave of layoffs across the tech sector with AI being, I think, falsely used as the justification for it. But but how do you anticipate the threat of AI to your business?
00:22:04
Speaker
I use AI every single day. i um I try to post and on LinkedIn like four times a week. Every single post is written with AI. i use AI to speed up everything I do.
00:22:16
Speaker
i would say ChatGPT has become the number one work productivity tool that I've ever used. um i use it for absolutely everything. um I use it to make presentations. I use it to make white papers.
00:22:30
Speaker
I think that The issue, though, is that people think that it will replace entry level jobs. And I think that tech companies are shooting themselves in the foot because we need entry level talent to do the work.
00:22:44
Speaker
However, I think that innovation is a good thing. And I think that, you know, like back in the day when factories were being created for the first time, people were scared of machines. They, you know, they broke into factories and destroyed machines.
00:22:57
Speaker
And, you know what happened ah over time we all found jobs in other places that were not as ah intensive not as manual and i think that's going to happen in this space as well it's just going to be like a painful couple probably a couple of years um you know i'm not going to speculate about the market but i think you have to use ai today to compete with anybody um But it's it's not it's not a bad thing.
00:23:30
Speaker
now's the time to innovate. Now that you don't have a job because you were laid off since AI made you lose your job, go figure out how to use ai to make a business. And you know founders are, for the first time, ai companies are reaching millions of dollars in revenue with like five to 10 staff members. So this is a really good time to shine. That's a really good perspective, George.
00:23:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'd also say yes, where you can use it for efficiency gains. You know, I was telling George, like, I had a bunch of handwritten notes from RSA, and you just dump it into Claude, which has amazing optical character recognition. And then just was like, can you put this in a spreadsheet so I can track my action items instead of the scrawl in this notepad?
00:24:20
Speaker
You know, it took... minutes to do what probably would have taken, you know, an hour manually creating the spreadsheet, like trying to translate my notes into something legible. And yeah, that saves me time. Like, please help me get the BS done faster. Right.
00:24:35
Speaker
um But as you pointed out, your first client is you physically flying out. to deal with an incident and also this narrative approach you have, right? So like when there is real heat or contact in a business, like humans still want to deal with humans, right? If there was like an incident commander chat bot, like someone would throw that computer through the window, right? Like that's not someone who's going to bring their blood pressure down or help them understand how to translate the story to their board or whatever.
00:25:07
Speaker
So yes, I take your point there.
Transgender Challenges and Advocacy
00:25:10
Speaker
um As we are sort of coming to the close here, Quinn, you did mention that you're trans and you and I have been going back and forth and you had ah you know just recently come out with that on LinkedIn.
00:25:23
Speaker
So, um yeah, I want to give you the space ah to talk about that issue and and why you may be abroad and things like that, because we believe on the show that staying quiet is just sort of a form of pre-surrender.
00:25:38
Speaker
And we're not here to do that. Sure. Yeah. so I've had almost $300,000 of plastic surgery. um For a long time, I thought that hiding that I'm trans is the only way that I could survive.
00:25:57
Speaker
to this day, I don't regret having all of those surgeries. But most people are not privileged enough to be in the situation that I was in to have those surgeries done.
00:26:10
Speaker
And early in my career, navigating transitioning while on the job was a fucking disaster. I was fired over it. You know, they would never publicly admit it, but I lost my job.
00:26:23
Speaker
And six months later, the CISO called back and he was like, yeah, we we want you back. And We don't know. You know, I didn't want to let you go, but your direct manager did. And so like people get fired for being trans. And now today, like there are so many anti trans laws being passed.
00:26:41
Speaker
It's illegal. I can't even if I go to Florida and I want to use the bathroom, I can be arrested for going to the women's bathroom. And if when let's say I go to the men's bathroom. you know, there's probably more of a risk there.
00:26:54
Speaker
um But I think the the worst thing that's happening now is trans people are losing their voting rights. um Laws are being passed, like the SAVE Act, um married women and and trans women are losing their voting rights. um they true The passport changes has led to a lot of trans people becoming undocumented.
00:27:15
Speaker
I talked to a trans woman a couple hours ago who told me, yeah, i um I migrated to Amsterdam and I don't have a passport and i'm in a I'm in a camp for immigrants.
00:27:26
Speaker
Because, you know, what are we supposed to do? I do not think so. I think that this is already a genocide by definition, but I do not think that this is going to slow down. I think it's going to get much, much worse. We're seeing it with immigrants.
00:27:41
Speaker
Trans people are not going to be, you know, separate from that.
Politics, Identity, and Business
00:27:45
Speaker
I think ultimately the current administration is running on fascism as a way to get votes and it worked and,
00:27:55
Speaker
That is not a good thing. um I lost probably a thousand followers for admitting I was trans. Well, that is, there's a lot there. The follower thing is just absolutely absurd. And also, I guess if they want to unfollow you for that, I mean, maybe those are the followers you don't want in the first place.
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I think part of it too is, um, There's very much been an over-politicization the LinkedIn platform, which I think is another ah i don't know. i I really do, or I did enjoy when LinkedIn was kind of apolitical and the focus was on business. It was on technology. And you could probably like intonate people's political views based on their style of posting or when they communicate on comments, but it was never like a declared thing. And now people are like, you know, waving the flags and and bickering with each other. And it's it's basically turned into X, which is like super unfortunate.
00:28:54
Speaker
um So I think it's tough where when you have this hyper politicized climate and a lot of folks who are in business who I think are not used to publicly engaging on political issues. And so they don't know how to do so in any kind of like respectful manner. It's a very emotional, very impulsive. And it's like weird. You're seeing these like.
00:29:14
Speaker
you know, impulsive college kid types of comments and reactions from people. It's just like unchecked id It's just like, and then it's like, it's like VP of like solutions architecture.
00:29:27
Speaker
What? You're like, you're you're smart. What is this shit? So part of the reason i hid that I was trans for a while was because of like DEI hiring policies.
00:29:37
Speaker
I didn't want to be a DEI hire. um i think that, What that resulted in was, know, currently they're being anti-DEI,
00:29:46
Speaker
um I think that ultimately like we're selling identity politics at work, like, Oh, you should hire, you know, blueberry security, my, my startup, because I'm trans. Don't you want to buy from a trans person or, you know, or a black person or whatever, you know, like it's, it's become a way to get sales. And I think, you know, and conservatives are doing it too. Like, Oh, I'm a conservative. Don't you want to buy from conservative business?
00:30:14
Speaker
And, um, I get why that is. But also, I think the reason politics now have to be openly discussed on LinkedIn and other platforms is government is censoring every single social media tool we have. um There is not good places to discuss these things unless it's in person.
00:30:35
Speaker
So that leaks out. People say things that they probably shouldn't say otherwise. I have nothing against conservatives. My first ever full-time employee was a conservative Christian.
00:30:46
Speaker
He has a master's degree in like theology. um you know i don't i don't think it's a bad thing to talk about politics, but I don't think it's it's just it's just a weird it's a weird time right now Yes, well, I think what you point out there is like when you strip it down to actual human to human interaction and you're not sort of just like keyboard warrioring, you know, anonymously, um you know, we can get down to just getting things done, you know, whether it's resolving incidents or.
00:31:21
Speaker
building a business together or working together. um Yes, I think that over politicization, especially around language is meant to divide. ah But when you meet people, that's where you can connect, right? It's just like impossible to be that kind of asshole in front of somebody when you're face to face with them.
00:31:40
Speaker
It's much easier to do it alienated and from a distance. But ah Quinn, thank you so much. I know your day is just starting over there in Japan and appreciate you, i guess, staying up late to catch us early and ah coping with the time zone and my recalcitrant Wi-Fi issues. So thank you for the time and attention.
Episode Conclusion and Call to Action
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, no problem. I um i work at East Coast hours, so I'm up all night anyways. All right. Well, we hope to run into you soon. See you soon. Thanks.
00:32:15
Speaker
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00:32:28
Speaker
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00:32:42
Speaker
Today, our guest is Quinlan Varco, founder and CEO of Black. No. Blueberry. Oh, it's going in the outtakes. Yeah, this is good job.