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The Tech Trek
By ElevanoTechnology
The Tech Trek episodes
- Ransomware: prevention, preparation and response with Dean Sapp
In this episode, we talk with Dean Sapp, the Vice President of Information Security, Risk, and Compliance, from Filevine. He discusses prevention tactics for ransomware and other cyber threats that businesses need to be aware of, as well as preparation techniques to prepare themselves against these types of events if they happen at some point
Key Takeaways:
- Importance of having a cyber breach policy in place.
- Educate your people about the human element in cybersecurity and how to stay protected.
- When a breach does occur, make sure you have a plan in place and know who to contact for help.
- The cost of prevention is less than the response, so it's important to be proactive about security threats.
- Breached Double Impact
About today’s guest: Dean is the Vice President of Information Security, Risk and Compliance for Filevine, the Operating Core for Legal, providing case, matter, investigation, and project management software for thousands of attorneys, law firms, and businesses across the globe.
Dean is also a security researcher, author, public speaker, and practitioner with two decades of experience implementing cost-effective and robust cybersecurity programs for clients. He has given dozens of presentations at the Utah State Bar, ABA, LegalSEC, ILTACon, Inns of Court, UAJ, Public Defenders & Trial Lawyer events, Infragard, ISACA, UtahSec, IR 18, SaintCon, and many other security and privacy conferences.
Dean is a security nerd at heart, but in his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife and six awesome kids, weight training, competing in Spartan races, and other ridiculously crazy and challenging things.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deansapp/
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Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and we would appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate and review us on your favorite podcast player.
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
26 min - Refactoring Your Data Team For Success with Oliver Bandte
Whether you are a startup, a small, or a large company, you can have different models in your organization. On today’s episode, we have our special guest, Oliver Bandte, the VP of Data & Analytics at Wellframe, to tackle what are the different organizational models and find out when you should reevaluate your org structure.
In this episode, we cover the following:
- Different data org models and structures
- Pulling apart the team's capabilities to help them best excel
- Tips to create strategic guidance for your org team.
- When do you re-evaluate the team's structure
- Ways to build collaborative teams
- Having strong managers to support each team allows you to separate functions
- Impact on hiring
- Know your own weaknesses
- Benefits of having a ring fence model.
About today’s guest:
Data & Analytics Executive with over 2 decades of experience in data science and analytics. Currently, Oliver is the VP of Data & Analytics at Wellframe, a digital care management company offering care management programs delivered through a digital platform. He runs Wellframe's Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, Data Science, and Business Intelligence teams. Oliver is also a part-time lecturer at Boston University, teaching a Business Analytics class on Competing with Analytics and a Capstone Project. He spent 7.5 years building and running analytics capability for the Boston Consulting Group, ran his own company prior, and started his career as a data scientist with a niche analytics consulting firm building advanced optimization and agent-based models. Oliver received a Master and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgie Tech.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverbandte/
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Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
26 min - Moving into a management role with Bren Briggs
On the show, I have on with me Bren Briggs, the VP of DevSecOps at Hypergiant. Bren talks about some of the realities of moving into a role in management, what happens if you decide to move back into an IC role, and managing with empathy.
In this episode, we cover:
- Moving into a management role
- Management skills should be equal to expertise.
- Indicator when to step down from management role.
- Having the most successful leaders and successful hierarchical structures.
- Having a culture of leadership that values feedback is a must.
- Psychological safety is essential.
- How does the org handle an employee that moves back into an IC role
- Manager empathy
- Management is a duty you perform
- Having someone run a tiger team
About today’s guest:
Bren is a hacker of things, smoker of meats, father of a brood of loud and often unruly children, and husband to his high-school sweetheart. When he's not playing music or working on a project, you can find him building, securing, and attacking cloud-native systems for Hypergiant.
https://twitter.com/0xfraq
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenbriggs/
________
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
26 min - Building Business-Focused Machine Learning Teams with Yash Desai
Today Yash Desai is on the show, the Head of B2B Machine Learning @ Wayfair. He’ll be diving into how he manages a team that stretches across multiple business units.
In this episode, we cover:
- Ways to manage a team that stretches across multiple business units
- Organizing a team into sub-teams or pods
- Business leaders will often expect you to know about the business.
- Importance of blocking times
- Importance of relationship for your business
- Creating a strategy-based team roadmap
- Using data to influence stakeholders
- Having a simple alternative solutions
- Understanding your roadmap timelines.
- Having a mindset shift is really important.
- Transition from consulting to production.
- Tips for building a cohesive team culture.
About today’s guest:
Yash Desai is a seasoned Machine Learning (ML) leader driving business impact and innovation at top organizations globally. Armed with a Bachelors & Masters in Electrical Engineering and Applied Statistics from IIT Bombay, his ML journey began when it was just an esoteric buzzword. He joined McKinsey right after school and served clients for AI transformation across Asia, Europe, and North America in Energy, Finance, and Healthcare sectors. Post consulting, he took up leadership roles at healthcare giant CVS Health and the home goods e-commerce leader Wayfair. He passionately engages in the ML community by mentoring budding data scientists from under-represented backgrounds and participates in conference panels. Outside work, Yash loves exploring beer gardens, playing cricket, and binge-watching Marvel movies.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/yashjdesai18
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whydesai
________
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
28 min - Nurturing Engineering Skills and Talents with Rajeev Nanda
Nurturing engineering talent is an art, not science.
My guest, Rajeev Nanda, the Director of Engineering Operations at Unlearn.ai. dives in to talk about career growth and exploration. He will share what he has learned in his managing career, including his tips and tricks.
In this episode, we cover:
- The concept of nurturing talent — career growth & talent growth.
- Importance of having a mentor in your organization.
- How to lead a technical organization: Manager responsibilities
- Technical versus Organizational growth path, what you need to know.
- Lesson Learned: Skills you need to manage people or technical teams effectively.
- Soft skills are much more difficult to master than hard skills.
- The Importance of communication between managers and their team members.
- Understanding your team's motivations is core and key to helping them grow.
- Dealing with a misalignment of employee aspirations and skills
- Building trust is a cornerstone of nurturing talent
- A Good Manager is Like a Gardener
About today’s guest:
More than three decades of hi-tech industry experience split between consulting, startups, and captive IT. Rajeev has successfully delivered software applications and solutions across multiple domains and platforms in leadership and management roles. He has managed and actively contributed to projects with business values ranging from $0.5M - $20M+. Built and managed cross-functional and cross-geo organizations sized 5 – 350+ with a motivated workforce and minimal attrition.
Rajeev has worked with CIOs and staff on strategic programs for technology and business transformations. He is a published author of books and articles on technology, strategy, management, and leadership in topics including AI, IoT, Cloud Computing, and innovation. His most recent book is RISE: Essential soft-skills for career management, which was released in Oct 2019.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeevnanda/
https://rnanda.com/
________
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
34 min - Empowering DevOps teams with Quentin Hartman
In today’s show, we have our guest, Quentin Hartman, VP of Infrastructure and DevOps Engineering, at Velocity Global, LLC. We cover a lot of DevOps ground...
In this episode, we cover:
- What historically has been called the DevOps team.
- Balancing the DevOps engineers team and the value of splitting them.
- DevOps team structure
- Differences between tooling and operations
- DevOps pillars
- What’s next with Quentin's team
- “Automation shelf life"
- DevOps career advice
Connect with Quentin Hartman at:
https://mastodon.social/@qhartman
https://twitter.com/qhartman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/qhartman
About today’s guest:
Quentin has been living and breathing DevOps since before it had a name. He loves the tech, but he loves seeing how DevOps practices make software and the lives of people who build it better. Throughout his nearly 25-year career in technology, Quentin has worked in public education, higher education, non-profits, and private businesses from 3 to 300,000 employees. In those roles, he has managed telecom systems, data centers, and public and private clouds and acted as a sysadmin, a DBA, a network engineer, an incident responder, and a leader. That broad experience has given him an especially strong foundation for DevOps, which has been his primary focus since 2012. Wherever Quentin is, he puts people before tech and is only happy when working on a social-impact mission using Open Source tools. Quentin lives near Denver, Colorado, with his family and can often be found building things, cooking, and wandering in the woods. He can be reached as ‘qhartman’ on many platforms, including Mastodon.social, Twitter, and LinkedIn
________
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
27 min - Building high performing engineering focused GRC functions with Terry O'Daniel
Our guest is Terry O'Daniel, the Director of Security Governance, Risk, and Compliance at Instacart. Terry talks about building high-performing engineering-focused GRC functions.
Key Takeaways:
- Unnecessary overhead on the engineering team
- Importance of focusing on operational hygiene and security risks.
- Risk as the common language between security and compliance.
- Dealing with risk and your engineering team
- Is shifting left, really the goal?
- Terry’s success formula, REVEALED!
- Importance of having deep conversations with your engineering functions.
- The value of shifting left
- Working with your developer towards better behavior.
- Security and compliance checkbox must-haves
- Importance of knowing your risk and having implemented controls.
- Tips to create a good engineering cultural shift.
- How to do less and empower your team
- The ultimate job is to be the second line of defense.
- Security is all about context
About Terry O'Daniel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/terryodaniel
Terry O’Daniel leads Security Governance, Risk, and Compliance at Instacart. His specialty is building lean teams focused on applying technology to solve security engineering & GRC challenges at scale via automation and instrumentation--rather than compliance-by-spreadsheet. Before Instacart, Terry built the functions for Security Assurance at Netflix, Security & Technology Risk & Compliance at Salesforce, and GRC within Production Engineering at Yahoo! He also worked in consulting to build security strategy, vCISO, and cyber risk quantification offerings for companies in highly regulated industries. In his spare time, Terry enjoys music, fencing, martial arts, and gaming with his kids.
________
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
31 min - The Business Value of Identity and Access Management with Grant Reveal
In this episode, Grant Reveal, the Director of Identity and Access Management at Micron Technology, talks about how we can demonstrate the business value of Identity and Access Management and how we get away from being viewed as the department of “NO” to “more SECURE”.
Key Takeaways:
- From the department of “no” to “more secure”
- Three components of IAM (People, Process, and Technology)
- Why does the story matter?
- Why Is Information Security important?
- Time component in learning IAM is a must.
- The day-1 Process is building relationships and making people secure.
- Identity and Access Management vs Traction
- The Automation of training and hiring time.
- How does the SDLC process help customers' needs?
- Having a defined roadmap for a team is very helpful.
- When leaders share their stories, they also build credibility.
- Compliance with IAM policies and procedures
- Strong procurement and audit systems
- Importance of building relationships and awareness in the organization.
About today’s guest:
Connect to Grant at: www.linkedin.com/in/grantreveal
Grant is an experienced leader with breadth and depth throughout the IT and InfoSec disciplines. His focus for almost ten years has been within the Identity and Access Management space, with experience building and leading the IAM teams for three Fortune 500 firms. Before focusing on the InfoSec discipline, Grant led IT teams and held senior-level leadership positions within Higher Education, including CIO. He has several professional certifications, including CISSP, CCSP, CRISC, CISM, CDPSE, and earned his Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from Franklin University. Grant has spoken at numerous conferences and gatherings regarding the business values IAM can deliver and was named to Security Magazine's 2019 List of Most Influential People in Security. Grant also values lifelong learning as he continues to pursue his Master's degree and works to give back through training and mentoring the next generation of technologists.
________
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
32 min - Scaling Within The Biomedical Industry with Matthew Clemente
In today’s episode, Matthew Clemente talks about the product and engineering scaling challenges working in the biomedical industry.
Key Takeaways:
- An overview of the Biomedical Industry
- Understanding the Biomedical regulatory overhead on the product roadmap
- Testing and regulatory issues.
- Acceleration and efficiencies in the development process.
- Understanding the team’s role & risk management.
- Mission-driven drivers
Connect with Matthew Clemente at https://www.linkedin.com/in/prspctvs
About today’s guest:
Matthew Clemente currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Product & Development at Bigfoot Biomedical, responsible for an innovative, emerging portfolio of diabetes care services and technologies transforming existing care models.
Matthew previously served as the Corporate Vice President of Delivery Systems Engineering at Novo Nordisk and as the Senior Director and Chief Technology Officer at Eli Lilly & Company, where he led the development of portfolios of connected drug delivery devices, applications, and algorithms that served as the foundation of both drug manufacturers and connected diabetes ecosystems. Before that, he was the Director of Advanced Drug Delivery Systems at Unilife Corporation. He built and managed an integrated engineering and science organization focused on mechanical, electromechanical, digital, and container closure systems for prefilled, preassembled, wearable drug delivery applications. Before Unilife, Matthew held various roles of increasing responsibility at multiple Johnson & Johnson companies. He primarily served in the new product development of insulin pumps at Animas Corporation for J&J’s Diabetes Care Franchise.
Matthew obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Miami and an MBA in Finance from Villanova University.
________
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
23 min - Building Data Governance Strategy with Solomon Madadha
What Is Data Governance and why does it matter? On the show, we have Solomon Madadha, the SVP of Data Analytics & Governance Wealth Management at Regions Bank. We talk about the increasing complexity of data, data collections, data democratization, and so much more….Tune in to the full episode.
In this episode, we cover
- Solomon’s responsibilities at Regions Bank.
- What are the challenges for Data Collections
- What is Data Quality and its importance
- How to ensure accuracy in data collection processes
- Importance of data consistency.
- Data Warehouse fundamental skill set.
- Data Quality and Accessibility measure.
- Data Governance roles and responsibilities.
- Data Governance challenges
- The impact of Data Governance in Cybersecurity
- Connect with Solomon Madahda
About today’s guest:
25 Years of well-rounded experience in Information Technology with 15 years in Enterprise Data Management and Advanced Analytics within the Financial Services Industry.
Visionary and cross-functional organizational leader in delivering business value with Enterprise data strategy, delivered scalable modern Enterprise Data solutions, self-servicing Advanced Analytics Platforms using Big Data and Data Science Capabilities.
Current responsibilities include vision, strategy, and execution of Data Analytics and Governance functions across the Wealth Management Business Units - Private Wealth Management, Institutional Services, Investment Services, Asset Management, and Retirement Services.
________
Thank you so much for checking out, this episode of The Tech Trek and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review on the Apple podcast app!
Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
26 min
About The Tech Trek
From the publisher's feed
The Tech Trek is a podcast about how founders, operators, and technology leaders build and scale technology companies.
Each episode explores the decisions behind building products, teams, and technical organizations, with conversations spanning engineering, AI, data, product, hiring, leadership, and growth.
Guests share what they are building, what they are learning, and how they are navigating the challenges that come with turning technology into a successful company.