AI is supercharging opportunities and challenges in cybersecurity with Rupal Hollenbeck

On this episode of Navigating Forward, Lisa Thee, Managing Director of Data & AI at Launch Consulting, welcomes Rupal Hollenbeck, President of Check Point Software for a discussion about AI and cybersecurity. They delve into both the challenges and opportunities that generative AI brings to cybersecurity, including that bad actors can now use tools like ChatGPT to compose more convincing phishing emails and even to create malware. On the flip side, they also talk about how AI can also help companies supercharge their own cybersecurity efforts. 

They also touch on how important it is to make sure that employees are learning about generative AI both now and on an ongoing basis as technologies evolve. Additionally, they discuss how organizations need to communicate about the security and privacy implications of generative AI use so that well-intentioned employees aren't accidentally sharing sensitive data. 

Find Rupal and Check Point Software at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupal-hollenbeck/ 
https://www.linkedin.com/company/check-point-software-technologies
https://twitter.com/checkpointsw
https://twitter.com/rupalshah1011 

Find Lisa and Launch Consulting at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisathee/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/launch-consulting-group/
https://www.launchconsulting.com/studios/data-ai

Transcript

00:00:03:09 - 00:00:45:11
Narrator
Welcome to Navigating Forward, brought to you by Launch Consulting, where we explore the ever-evolving world of technology, data, and the incredible potential for artificial intelligence. Our experts come together with the brightest minds in AI and technology, discovering the stories behind the latest advancements across industries. Our mission: to guide you through the rapidly changing landscape of tech, demystifying complex concepts and showcasing the opportunities that lie ahead. Join us as we uncover what your business needs to do now to prepare for what's coming next. This is Navigating Forward.

00:00:45:13 - 00:01:13:29
Lisa Thee
Welcome to the Navigating Forward podcast. My name is Lisa Thee, and I'll be your host today. We love bringing influential movers, shakers, and thought leaders to the forefront to help you navigate all of these changes happening in technology real-time. Today I have the honor of bringing you Rupal Hollenbeck. Rupal is the President of Check Point Software. She also has an extensive history in investing and senior leadership positions within corporations, including places like Oracle and Intel.

00:01:14:01 - 00:01:33:05
Lisa Thee
And she is a board member at Blackbaud. So, we're so excited to have such an inspiring woman in tech coming in to tell us all the things that we need to know about cyber and AI and women in STEM and all of those trends from both an operator and an investor point of view. Thank you so much for joining us today Rupal.

00:01:33:08 - 00:01:38:19
Rupal Hollenbeck
Thank you, Lisa. And you're pretty formidable yourself, so it's great to be in your company.

00:01:38:21 - 00:01:52:10
Lisa Thee
I always like to surround myself with people that inspire me. You are, this is like one of those full circle moments where one of the senior leaders at early, at earlier in my career is now on my podcast. Who would ever imagine? It's such an honor to have you.

00:01:52:16 - 00:01:53:07
Rupal Hollenbeck
Thank you.

00:01:53:12 - 00:02:13:18
Lisa Thee
So, Rupal, can you tell us a little bit about your career journey? Can you start us from the beginning. Would you have ever imagined, you know, as a little girl that you'd be running a software company, being on a board of directors of multiple places, and now fueling the future generations? I just would love to hear, where do you think this all started from?

00:02:13:21 - 00:02:36:02
Rupal Hollenbeck
Yeah. You know, I don't really know, Lisa, I have to tell you. And that's such an important lesson now that I'm, you know, sort of 28 years on in my career, it is so important to keep your aperture open. And that's probably the single biggest thing I've learned in my career and in what I like to instill in my own children is an open aperture.

00:02:36:02 - 00:02:59:10
Rupal Hollenbeck
And that really describes my career. It describes my 28 years. Did I ever think I would be in tech, let alone cybersecurity? Absolutely not. I was a finance major in college with a minor in international business. I went on to get my MBA. I lived in Japan in between, and I thought I would be working for a consumer goods company or I’d be in banking.

00:02:59:12 - 00:03:16:05
Rupal Hollenbeck
And that's honestly what I thought when I started my career, and this little company called Intel came knocking and I thought I would give this whole tech thing a try in the mid-nineties. I thought I would give whole tech thing a try for a few years, and then I, and then I would sort of move on and have my real career.

00:03:16:12 - 00:03:43:10
Rupal Hollenbeck
And Lisa, I caught that tech bug so badly. Two things happened. I caught the tech bug. I became enamored not just with what technology did, but what technology enabled. You know, it's not what you make. It's what you make possible. And that's what I fell in love with. I fell in love with what could be possible. At the same time, I joined a company with whom I had a tremendous value match.

00:03:43:12 - 00:04:04:05
Rupal Hollenbeck
And when your personal values and the company's values are well aligned, the more values you have in common, the longer you stay. And the more productive you are, the more successful you are. And the more successful you feel. And so, you know, that explains 23 years at a phenomenal company, living and working in three different countries.

00:04:04:11 - 00:04:26:25
Rupal Hollenbeck
And I knew that that, while I would have been happy to stay on, I also knew that there was something else out there, and I needed to prove to myself that that there were other things out there that I could participate in in a meaningful way. And so, I went on from semiconductors into software and cloud got a crash course at Oracle, which I'm so grateful for.

00:04:27:00 - 00:04:54:27
Rupal Hollenbeck
And then I went on to a small AI startup where, you know, just finer and finer points got put on my tech bug and I got excited about the possibilities with AI and around the same time joined the board of directors of Check Point. And I actually started my journey in cybersecurity on the board at Check Point. And so now I started bringing together the world of cybersecurity in the world of AI.

00:04:54:27 - 00:05:09:08
Rupal Hollenbeck
Well, heck, if you're in tech right now, there is nothing that you do in tech that isn't touched by a combination of AI and cyber. And so, the decision to then move inside into an operating role at Check Point was pretty easy.

00:05:09:10 - 00:05:21:18
Lisa Thee
Probably for both sides, seeing as how you had established your leadership in a governance role on the board. And so, they knew how you operated and built that trust over time. So, I imagine it was a very easy decision on both sides.

00:05:21:25 - 00:05:51:20
Rupal Hollenbeck
Funny. Lisa It was, I joke with our founder and CEO, Gil Shwed, who’s amazing, that I say, Gil, you and I had the world's longest interview. My, you know, I was interviewing you for 15 months. You were kind of interviewing me. And so that transition inside the company was both natural and I think more impactful by the experience I brought because I was bringing a different lens to the operator role, having just served on the board.

00:05:51:20 - 00:06:09:27
Lisa Thee
Absolutely. So, with that in mind, I would love to hear your thoughts about how the trends of generative AI are impacting the cybersecurity field, because I think that it has always been a hot topic. Regulation came in about ten years back that made it, moved it from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have on everybody's board.

00:06:09:27 - 00:06:28:05
Lisa Thee
But now we are in this new renaissance of this new tool, this new age that’s bringing so much more information to the forefront. And in my experience, criminals tend to innovate a little bit faster than corporations. And I would love to just hear your perspective on the front lines of this. What are you seeing in terms of trends that we should all be paying more attention to?

00:06:28:08 - 00:06:51:21
Rupal Hollenbeck
Yeah, I love that you made that statement that sometimes it feels like the bad actors are moving a little bit faster. Therein lies both the challenge and the tremendous opportunity and excitement for me to be in this space. So, without a doubt, you are absolutely right. AI is supercharging cybersecurity, without a doubt for both the good guys and the bad guys.

00:06:51:23 - 00:07:16:18
Rupal Hollenbeck
And I'll bring up ChatGPT because, you know, you can't have a conversation today without mentioning ChatGPT. But here's the thing. On a serious note, with ChatGPT, the bad actors can more easily create malicious code, malicious phishing mails. They are near perfectly written without any errors. They look so much more believable than they ever had before.

00:07:16:25 - 00:07:53:13
Rupal Hollenbeck
You can write bad code. It is harder to detect this than, than ever. And so, our own, I'll give you an example. Our own Check Point research team is seeing hackers on the dark web that are actually sharing advice with one another on how to create malware with ChatGPT.  We have not only confirmed that creating this malicious code is possible, but the thing that's really scary is it democratizes bad action and it actually allows more folks to enter the world of being a hacker.

00:07:53:15 - 00:08:51:21
Rupal Hollenbeck
And so, hacker status now goes to those without a whole lot of technical knowledge. I, you know, coming from my background, I can use ChatGPT to do things that I couldn't do before it in a bad way. And that sort of opens the aperture and opens the vulnerability for lots of organizations. And then there's this whole other side of it Lisa, which is companies and employees who are behaving in the wrong way, but they don't know it. They are inadvertently sharing information. They're plugging into ChatGPT with the best of intentions to get great output, but they're putting personal information into ChatGPT without actually realizing that this information is now available and makes ChatGPT smarter for others and potentially gets their private information out there on the internet.

00:08:51:21 - 00:09:09:28
Rupal Hollenbeck
And, you know, and so there's this, there's the bad actors being able to be worse. There are more folks entering the world of being bad actors, and then there are employees who have the best of intentions for their organizations, or they're using it for good, but they're inadvertently doing not so good.

00:09:10:01 - 00:09:37:03
Lisa Thee
It is such a delicate time because the barrier for entry of technical skills to be able to leverage some of these technology innovations, which frankly have been around for quite a while, but the accessibility required has changed dramatically. But the barrier to entry on costs, the barrier to entry on technical skills, the barrier on entry of coordination and communication has all come down dramatically, which can lead to some wonderful outcomes.

00:09:37:03 - 00:10:21:27
Lisa Thee
Right? It makes education more accessible. It makes us closer together. But as we know on platforms, they are neutral and so people can choose to apply it for the best and for the worst. And so, we, you need to be thinking through your strategies. So, for business leaders that are both concerned about potential privacy breaches with their employees as well as intentional hacks with people that are targeting their companies, can you give a little bit of guidance for a business leader that knows something about this? I think we all know something about this at this point, knows it's probably a priority, doesn't want to end up on the lead story on the news, but isn't quite sure how to understand their maturity of their systems from a cybersecurity perspective today.

00:10:21:29 - 00:10:27:21
Lisa Thee
What do you recommend to those folks that have that Spidey sense that they need to do something? But now what?

00:10:27:24 - 00:11:23:23
Rupal Hollenbeck
Yeah, yeah. Steady as she goes. And I wish, I wish I could say, Lisa, that there was an expert in this space, but we are all learning every day, we're learning every hour, as it were. And the thing that I would caution against is extreme positions in either direction. So, I'll give an example of Samsung, which you may have read a public example that engineers accidentally, right, this is one of those best of intention scenarios, but Samsung engineers accidentally leaked some sensitive information into ChatGPT. And Samsung became so concerned about this, as any organization would be, that they actually went to the other extreme and they actually banned all their employees from using it altogether. Now, I think that either extreme, I understand why a company would sort of open up ChatGPT for all employees, and I would also understand why they would shut it down, because they're concerned, right.

00:11:23:23 - 00:11:49:02
Rupal Hollenbeck
Especially if there's a leak like at Samsung. But the reality is this, like most other things in our lives and in technology, it's some space in between. So, it's steady as she goes. I think that I'll talk about the advice that I would give to companies and then how we're doing it. So, the advice that I would give to companies is, ChatGPT is out there and your employees are using it in their personal lives.

00:11:49:07 - 00:12:10:28
Rupal Hollenbeck
They may be using it on their, on work machines in their personal lives. And so, I think locking down its use can be difficult. It can be difficult to control. I think the most important thing is to have open lines of communication with your employees and to share, because we're all learning. There are communities out there to share and learn.

00:12:11:01 - 00:12:35:09
Rupal Hollenbeck
We have communities among, in our developer community to learn and share and to become as knowledgeable as you can. Take a conservative approach to what you share in ChatGPT and learn from it. I still think and I'm maybe a constant optimist, but I believe that while the bad guys might be moving faster, there is plenty of opportunity.

00:12:35:09 - 00:12:58:05
Rupal Hollenbeck
So much that we can do with generative AI for good. And so, when I say AI supercharges cyber, I rattled off some things on that on the not-so-great side, but I want to talk about what's possible. Check Point I think is really leading the way and I'm really proud of the work that we're doing at the intersection of AI and cyber.

00:12:58:08 - 00:13:30:08
Rupal Hollenbeck
And so, I think there are tremendous implications. We've used AI inside of Check Point since around 2014, if not sooner. Around 2014, to really power the intelligence behind every one of the products we build. And this isn't just cyber, across the board generative AI can have a tremendous impact in increased productivity, in broadening of the lens in in what you see out there, and in better business outcomes.

00:13:30:10 - 00:13:54:04
Rupal Hollenbeck
And so, we use AI to power every single one of our security products, and the one that, something that I'm really proud of is ThreatCloud AI. ThreatCloud AI has 40 different AI engines and it's the brains behind every one of our products. It makes, and this blows my mind when I think about it, it makes 2 billion security decisions every day.

00:13:54:08 - 00:14:30:26
Rupal Hollenbeck
Think about that. And so, yeah, so ThreatCloud AI makes, enables 2 billion security decisions every day. Talk about AI for good. This is about prevention. This is stuff that we're preventing. And so, we've got a few differentiators in this space, and it helps drive everyone at our company. With AI you can have the more, we know this right, that and it's pre baseline that the more data you have available, the better your models are going to be and the better the technology and then business outcomes.

00:14:30:28 - 00:14:54:00
Rupal Hollenbeck
And the thing is, Lisa, like we've been at it for 30 years. So, so in our 30-year history we've amassed some data and that data just makes us better. And it's one of the world's largest data lakes, feeding algorithms and cyber. And so, we actually started the journey, like I said, in 2014 as a way to stay ahead of hackers.

00:14:54:02 - 00:15:15:16
Rupal Hollenbeck
Our Threat Intelligence team realized that the best way to fight malware is to consolidate all the data that was coming in from all the gateways we had out there that protect your networks, everything in the cloud, everything on prem, everything on mobile devices. Because you and I both know threats happen from everywhere. So let me, so short pop quiz.

00:15:15:16 - 00:15:24:00
Rupal Hollenbeck
Lisa, do you know the entry point that is the most common for bad actors if you look at the entire cybersecurity landscape?

00:15:24:03 - 00:15:26:16
Lisa Thee
I would assume that would be an employee.

00:15:26:18 - 00:15:33:09
Rupal Hollenbeck
It would be an employee. It's usually the people. What device or what entry point do you think they enter into?

00:15:33:11 - 00:15:34:18
Lisa Thee
Mobile?

00:15:34:21 - 00:15:37:17
Rupal Hollenbeck
Yeah. Adjacent to mobile, yes. It's email.

00:15:37:17 - 00:15:38:23
Lisa Thee
Okay. Yep.

00:15:38:26 - 00:15:50:01
Rupal Hollenbeck
Email is the biggest entry point. Right? If you think about, I think almost every one of us, everyone that I talk to says, oh yeah, I got that one email and I clicked and I shouldn't have.

00:15:50:04 - 00:15:54:14
Lisa Thee
And it's that moment where you hit the button. Then you go, oh, I know better than this.

00:15:54:17 - 00:16:20:28
Rupal Hollenbeck
I know, I know. And I, and I do it too. And we’ve got to remember, hover is our friend, hover is our friend. I have to tell you, in this increasing threat landscape, think about all that data. Right? So again, going back to what we do, the best way is to take all the data we have and have it inform the way we develop all our products, learn from what happens in email and apply it to IoT.

00:16:21:00 - 00:16:33:01
Rupal Hollenbeck
You know, my founder and CEO, Gil, he likes to talk about the metaphor of a fire. If there's a fire on one floor of a building, the whole building evacuates.

00:16:33:03 - 00:16:37:00
Lisa Thee
You don’t say, those who are on the first floor, it’ll take a while to get down to you. Don't worry about it.

00:16:37:01 - 00:16:58:09
Rupal Hollenbeck
Right? Right. Or it'll never get here. The first floor will be done and that'll be it. Yeah, but you know the threat landscape and organizations, right? CIOs, CEOs, boards, they're thinking about protecting the enterprise. Cyber isn't about protecting a floor. Cyber isn’t about protecting IT. Cyber is about protecting the people in an organization and their customers and their supply chain.

00:16:58:11 - 00:17:22:16
Rupal Hollenbeck
And so, when that fire happens, you got to get everywhere. You got to evacuate the whole building. You have to check the structure of the whole building. That's how we use AI to make our cybersecurity products better. It's about sharing and having that collaborative and consolidated approach to cybersecurity that takes the intelligence in our ThreatCloud AI and applies it to every product we build.

00:17:22:18 - 00:18:04:26
Rupal Hollenbeck
Because of that actor, a bad actor tries to get in one way that doesn't work. Guess what? The front door doesn't work. They're going to try a window or a back door and so it's tremendously important for us to use this ThreatCloud AI and all this data to help deliver consolidated and collaborative solutions. And we educate our employees when it comes to employees and that sensitive data, educating our employees and making sure that sensitivity of information and privacy of information is held in the highest regard when we're using generative AI, just as we're using any other technology tool that allows for access outside the company.

00:18:04:26 - 00:18:09:08
Rupal Hollenbeck
Incredibly important for us to understand that as employees of any company.

00:18:09:11 - 00:18:41:22
Lisa Thee
So, I want to reiterate a couple of key points that I heard from you there. Number one, by leveraging AI technology that's been trained on 30 years of data, you have one of the largest pools of information to pull from. So, in most AI applications, it's predicting based on past events what will happen in the future. So, keeping those models current and keeping that information fed with over 2 billion decisions a day, that allows you to stay ahead of the threat vectors that are emerging and also be looking for things that have historically been successful in the past.

00:18:41:22 - 00:19:02:00
Lisa Thee
Because as we know, sometimes what's old is new again and can be very effective. The second thing is, that volume of data, it's not going to be a small group of people looking at things manually that's going to be able to detect some of these patterns that are emerging that lead you to recognize that you're on the brink of someone making moves to breach your system.

00:19:02:00 - 00:19:37:28
Lisa Thee
So having a holistic data strategy where people really understand the information that they are working with and understand the privacy that's required around that information, but then also understand how to leverage modern tools like ChatGPT without leaking private information into that is really key. So, every organization really needs to be thinking about their data literacy, their privacy literacy, and making sure that they're not an open vessel for cyber-attacks as it tends to be targeted towards the employees and even just simple email.

00:19:38:00 - 00:20:02:11
Rupal Hollenbeck
Exactly. Exactly. Remember years ago, Lisa, when we were educating organizations on what it means to use Google, we all had to take social media training. We all had to get well versed. And social media has also evolved over the years. Similarly, I think with generative AI, it's really important to start setting some baseline education and the fundamentals in place for your employees.

00:20:02:11 - 00:20:23:14
Rupal Hollenbeck
And there is no employee who isn't going to be touching generative AI in some way, shape, or form in the very near future. So having that baseline of education is important and then iterating because it changes, right, at the at the speed of tech. And so, making sure that you're constantly refreshing that and becoming aware and educating yourself.

00:20:23:14 - 00:20:32:18
Rupal Hollenbeck
And this isn't something where IT departments need to educate themselves and then train. We all need to be getting educated and trained on a very regular basis.

00:20:32:20 - 00:20:58:20
Lisa Thee
Yeah, and I know we have a shared passion around AI for good Rupal. One of the things that's interesting to me is this privacy discussion we get into often, which is the tradeoffs between privacy and safety, because they tend to be two sides of the same coin and you're constantly trying to rebalance how do I protect my communities inclusive of my employees, but also my customers, and making sure that they have the best protections out there for their information.

00:20:58:20 - 00:21:19:13
Lisa Thee
But then also that I am protecting people that are maybe victims of crimes or felonious kinds of activities. And I need to have some purview into what's happening. So can you talk a little bit about how you guys look at that balance between privacy and safety as a software company? And how do you proceed with making those tradeoffs?

00:21:19:13 - 00:21:23:29
Lisa Thee
Because it's not a one and done solution, right? It's something you have to revisit from time to time.

00:21:24:02 - 00:21:49:08
Rupal Hollenbeck
I would say the one thing I would change about what you just said is it's not from time to time, it's all the time. I think that that focus on compliance and governance and that focus on the balance between security and privacy is very, very important. It's something that we take seriously. It's core to our mission. And so, organizations need to be thinking about that balance through education and training.

00:21:49:08 - 00:22:15:14
Rupal Hollenbeck
And the thing that I will say, Lisa, is that it starts young, that balance and that education of the implications of the real-world decisions that we make every day with tech, it starts very, very early. It starts from K-12 education, secondary education, and then throughout one's career. And if I could just take a minute because I'm so passionate about the education space and starting young.

00:22:15:14 - 00:22:44:14
Rupal Hollenbeck
The best thing that we can do to protect vulnerable populations is to engage with them very early, to make them aware, because the best defense is a good offense. And the best way to protect these vulnerable populations is to educate them in the front and to prevent this from happening in the first place. We are a prevention-first company and that permeates everything we do.

00:22:44:16 - 00:23:13:17
Rupal Hollenbeck
And so that's, you know, one of the reasons in addition to my own personal passion around education, instead of an education in technology literacy and cyber literacy. And so we engage with universities around the world, from Tel Aviv University in Israel to the University of South Carolina, where there's actually a degree program in cybersecurity that we helped build and deploy and something we're very proud of.

00:23:13:17 - 00:23:35:27
Rupal Hollenbeck
And so that's a that's a workforce statement. Underneath that, we have schools all over that come and visit us. We participate in secondary education and offer our services to schools to be able to speak to students. And I love this example. My daughter, who is in high school, she's a teenager and one of her best friends was hacked on Instagram.

00:23:35:27 - 00:24:02:16
Rupal Hollenbeck
And I got the request to send $1,000 to her because she was in trouble. And I immediately called my daughter and it's actually a good outcome because I was so proud of what she did. She said, Mom, she said the problem is so and so didn't use multi-factor authentication. And I thought here is my 17-year-old reminding me that she and her friends have to use multi-factor authentication.

00:24:02:23 - 00:24:29:09
Rupal Hollenbeck
She pulled her entire group of friends together and made everybody change all their social media settings to multi-factor authentication. And I thought, you know what? Just that is a sign that young people are very open with their information. They're very open on social media. They're also smart. And we have an opportunity to get in early and educate and make people aware.

00:24:29:09 - 00:25:01:18
Rupal Hollenbeck
And that small little action that I describe in my example, that's where it starts. That's grassroots, and that's about prevention first. And I feel good that my daughter is an advocate for being safe online and protecting your personal information. And I'm really proud of what she did. How we scale that throughout the educational community, I think is critical to the safety of our young people and then carrying that safety into the workforce.

00:25:01:21 - 00:25:21:10
Lisa Thee
I love that example. If you don't mind, I'm going to share an example from my own home. And that was, I watched The Social Dilemma with my children, being in AI for good since 2016, I have volunteered as an expert for the Center for Humane Technology that produced that documentary. And so, my little guy was nine years old at the time.

00:25:21:10 - 00:25:47:28
Lisa Thee
And we're taking a drive in the car about a week later, he just from the backseat randomly goes, Mom, how big do you think my avatar is online? And wait, how big is yours? I bet yours is way bigger than mine because I have been training social, I've been putting my data in AI so that they can profile me nearly as much as you have.

00:25:48:00 - 00:26:12:00
Lisa Thee
And I thought to myself, wow, that took me like 3 to 4 years in my career to figure out how the data ingestion going into the models and all the labeling and all the tuning and optimizations need to happen in order to be able to predict what somebody is going to do based on a supercomputer, not just on their data, but the data of millions and billions like them and all of those things.

00:26:12:00 - 00:26:24:06
Lisa Thee
And I'm like, this kid watched an hour and a half documentary and gets the entire concept that anything you put out there is going to be used back to influence your decisions going forward.

00:26:24:08 - 00:26:28:11
Rupal Hollenbeck
That's amazing. Amazing. Lisa, how old is your son now?

00:26:28:17 - 00:26:51:12
Lisa Thee
He is 11 now. And I will admit that it gets a lot trickier to ensure online safety the older they get. You can't shelter them completely from the world. That's not going to produce adults that can function. And so that's why it's such a delicate dance of giving them as much freedom as they can earn. But also, a trust but verify model is what I use in my home.

00:26:51:15 - 00:27:12:04
Rupal Hollenbeck
I love that. And when, in about eight years, please send your son to my office so that we can, he can start his first internship at the intersection of AI and cyber. And I kind, I'm only half kidding, Lisa, because the other, you know, the other part of this, the intersection of AI and cyber, is really easy to say and it slips off your tongue.

00:27:12:06 - 00:27:38:23
Rupal Hollenbeck
But boy, this workforce shortage, it's real and getting more young people interested and excited about this intersection. It's really powerful. It has wild human impacts, let alone business impact. We just, we need more, more folks like your son to express that interest, to glean those insights at such a young age. It's really promising and it kind of gives me, it gives me great hope for this next generation.

00:27:38:25 - 00:27:59:21
Lisa Thee
He was so funny. I took him to an NFT conference in downtown L.A. and he saw me on stage for the first time last summer because he was a little bit too young to travel with me for other things. And he goes, okay, Mom, I guess I'll admit it. I do look at you a little differently now that I see you, he goes, that was pretty cool.

00:27:59:28 - 00:28:11:24
Lisa Thee
And I'm like, yeah, I'm not just the person that lectures you at home on cybersecurity. Like people actually pay me to do this honey.

00:28:11:24 - 00:28:30:27
Rupal Hollenbeck
That’s amazing. You know, like, it's, you know, same example. I am so not cool until a couple of years ago, like within the last couple of years I've gotten so much cooler with my teenagers and when that happened for my daughter, she called me and I got on a little call. She put me on speakerphone, and she had all her girlfriends in her dorm room.

00:28:30:27 - 00:28:39:22
Rupal Hollenbeck
And, you know, we talked about it and she's like, my mom will know what to do. Let's call my mom. And so, I got cooler at her high school.

00:28:39:22 - 00:28:57:09
Lisa Thee
I love that. So, if you don't mind, I would love to close out with one of the accomplishments that you're most proud of in this journey. I imagine that there have been many times throughout your journey where the next right decision wasn't always clear, and you had to take risk and make big bets on yourself and others.

00:28:57:11 - 00:29:04:05
Lisa Thee
What is one of your proudest accomplishments so far in this very thriving and successful career that you've created?

00:29:04:07 - 00:29:41:02
Rupal Hollenbeck
Well, thank you for saying that. I think there have been many lessons that I've learned over the years, and I would say that more of those lessons came from mistakes than from successes. But for me, it's much more fundamental. My very definition of leadership. Everyone has their own personal definition. But as I've grown in my career, my definition of leadership, successful leadership that is, is taking a diverse group of individuals with very different backgrounds, bringing them together and helping them together accomplish something that they never thought possible, that they never thought was possible on their own.

00:29:41:04 - 00:30:05:19
Rupal Hollenbeck
And a couple of defining moments for me always center around the people. I'm sort of people first, then process, then technology and business outcome. And so, when I think about the people, the thing that I'm the most proud of is along the way in the last 28 years, so many amazing people that I've brought onboard my teams over the years have gone on to accomplish great things.

00:30:05:21 - 00:30:25:25
Rupal Hollenbeck
They've gone on to be chief revenue officers, they've gone off to be presidents, they've gone off to be leaders in their own right and go on to accomplish great things. It's probably Lisa, the thing that I am the most excited about so far, and it's probably what will always bring me the most satisfaction.

00:30:25:25 - 00:30:57:20
Lisa Thee
So not only do you earn yourself a seat at the table where decisions are made, you pulled up extra chairs for people that deserve to participate in the conversation. And I think that's where we are all going to innovate the best is when we are co-creating together, because that's where the magic happens and that might be co-creation between machines and humans, different types of humans, different types of experiences. The broader the lens of the context we can bring to a problem, the more innovative of a solution we can bring forward that will benefit us as a society for the kind of world we want to live in.

00:30:57:20 - 00:31:08:18
Lisa Thee
So, thank you so much, Rupal, for your time today. For anybody that's interested in following your journey and learning more about Check Point and yourself as a leader, where are the best ways to keep tabs on you?

00:31:08:18 - 00:31:24:23
Rupal Hollenbeck
Well, I do do a lot of writing on LinkedIn. I publish through our blogs at checkpoint.com, and I've recently actually joined the executive board of Fast Company. And so, you'll see me writing there as well.

00:31:24:25 - 00:31:32:08
Lisa Thee
That's really good to know because they happen to be my publisher of my book coming out in September. So, we have something to talk about a little later.

00:31:32:11 - 00:31:35:20
Rupal Hollenbeck
I see a connection. Always fantastic to talk.

00:31:35:21 - 00:31:57:12
Lisa Thee
Yeah. And for our listeners that are looking for some help and just orienting where they are today and where they want to be going, I just want to reiterate that at Launch we can help you with both cybersecurity and digital safety assessments to understand where you are today, and workshops to find where you want to be and working with partners in the ecosystem to bring the best ideas to bear and help be a guide through this journey.

00:31:57:12 - 00:32:08:17
Lisa Thee
So, people like Rupal are the people that we love to stay modern and current with, because when we work together we get better outcomes. And I really want to thank you so much for being here as a guest on our show today, Rupal.

00:32:08:18 - 00:32:14:02
Rupal Hollenbeck
Thank you, Lisa. It's great talking to you.