Host Dave Johnson and co-host Ben Baker sit down with Greg Notch, Chief Security Officer at Expel, and Jay Beale, CEO and CTO of InGuardians, for the first installment of the Early Adopters series. Greg and Jay share how they stumbled into cybersecurity before it had a name, built tools and standards that didn't exist yet, and found that the same curiosity that makes a great practitioner also makes a surprisingly good leader.

Key topics & timestamps

How they got started (1:41 - 8:15)

• Jay: Unix sysadmin at a university, suspected a hacker, wrote a hardening script, fell into Bastille Linux
• Greg: broke copy protection as a kid, became the NHL's first de facto CISO after a real incident made it real
• Dave: exploited a NetWare login screen at age 11 to print for free; attended HOPE 2000 with his dad at 16

Building security before the frameworks existed (18:55 - 21:00)

• No CIA triad, no NIST, no SANS certifications—just BBSs, Bugtraq, and people sharing what they figured out
• Aleph One's "Smashing the Stack" first appeared as a plain text file on a BBS
• The early community wasn't malicious—there was nothing to steal; it was a pure pursuit of knowledge

Hacking is QA (17:21 - 18:01)

• Jay ran the QA department at Bethesda Softworks in high school before it became the Elder Scrolls company
• Offensive and defensive security are both about asking "what happens if I do something unexpected?"

Curiosity as a leadership advantage (24:59 - 27:10)

• The same systems-thinking that makes a great practitioner translates directly to leading people
• Greg's test: ask aspiring managers what books they've read—most name a Python book, not one on team dynamics
• Empathy is a skill, not a personality trait—and it's learnable the same way technical skills are

The one thing that hasn't changed (30:49 - 31:12)

• With sufficient motivation, time, and effort: they're gonna get in
• 100% failure rate—always has been, still is

Key quotes

"For all of us defensive security people, for all of us offsec folks—we're kind of QA folks who found a way to make it cool. What are we doing? We're looking for ways to find out: what happens if I put in input that might be unexpected? It's a very, very related job. We just get to have a lot more fun with it." — Jay Beale

"Curiosity is a major advantage in leadership. But the system you become curious about isn't hardware, software, networks—it's human interaction. Team dynamics. What motivates people. My memory corruption vulnerability now is: how do I motivate someone during a one-on-one?" — Greg Notch

"Curiosity killed the cat—but the part we forgot is 'satisfaction brought it back.' We are very much in the satisfaction brought it back category." — Dave Johnson

Helpful links

• InGuardians
• Expel

Production credits

• Hosts: Dave Johnson, Ben Baker
• Producer: Ben Baker
• Sponsor: Expel Inc.

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