Joe Payne Transcript
Clint Betts
Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are the CEO of Code42, which is a leader in data loss and insider threat protection, particularly for employees with data leakage or employee theft, which is really interesting. I was on your website a lot this morning and doing a lot of research for you for this interview, and I was like, man, where were you when Edward Snowden was stealing secrets from the NSA? If only they'd had Code42. Or who's the other guy? The Assange guy. If only they'd had Code42, none of this would've happened.
Joe Payne
Well, there's also a guy named Anthony Levandowski who stole data from Google, their self-driving car data, took it with him, formed a company, and then sold it to Uber. He ended up getting convicted and going to jail and it was pretty embarrassing for Google that he took all this data, 15,000 files, on his last day of work. And so you need software like this to protect you from employees that make some poor decisions on their way out the door.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that one's even more relevant. That one's crazy, actually, the fact that that happened and man, he got pretty far too, getting it all the way to building it and selling it.
Joe Payne
He built it, sold the company, and they had to be disgorged, and it ended up ruining his life. He went to prison; he's a convicted felon. There's an end to that story, by the way, that most people don't realize. In his last week in office, President Trump pardoned Anthony Levandowski, commuted his sentence, and let him out of prison, which was a strange ending. You might ask why, but he's a friend of Peter Thiel's, I guess, and if you're a friend of Peter Thiels, that gets you into the White House somehow.
Clint Betts
Wow, that's fascinating. I had no idea. Well, sure. Why not? Everybody should be pardoned. Why not? What do I care? Hey-
Joe Payne
Anyway, thank you so much. Let me just say upfront: thanks for having me on your podcast. We're going to talk today about things that are near and dear to my heart, which is certainly Code42, but also just leadership in general. And you nailed the intro where we focus entirely on insider threats to help people understand what we do. We would like to say our mission is to secure a collaborative culture. And that's a lot of words, I know, but we don't want to just get in the way of people moving data around. Today, lots of us collaborate and share data, and so we just wrap a layer of security around that to actually enable that sharing. And so it's a really more modern approach to handling this problem. It's not an authoritarian approach to handle this problem, and it really helps our customers, who are the security teams, be an enabler of the business as opposed to simply getting in the way.
Clint Betts
How did you get to be CEO of Code42?
Joe Payne
That's a good question. I'm a serial CEO, and the venture capital firm Xcel Partners called me about this job. I went and looked at it, and at the time, Code42 was really an endpoint backup business. Think about taking everything off your endpoint and your computer and putting it in the cloud. So we did this for consumers, small businesses, and large enterprises, and I looked at it, and I said, "Geez, that's really an interesting company because there are great people, there's some great tech, and also great customers, but it's in a dying business. Can I go there and transform that business and find a new area that's a growth area for the business?"
And that's what I've spent the last nine years doing. I will tell you if you'd asked me nine years ago, "Will it take you nine years?" Unfortunately, I would've said, "Oh, it'll probably take us three to four years." So, the transformation of a business is a lot harder and a lot more humbling than I expected. So I've been here nine years. I love the people. We have great investors, we have great customers, but we've been through a lot of transformation over the years.
Clint Betts
Joe, what do you think of this idea? I have experienced this all the time, and everything takes longer than you think. You just mentioned, "Hey, we'll have this wrapped up in three to four years," and why do we set those expectations for ourselves? And it's probably realistic at the time, but I've never had anything that's meaningful, I should say, that doesn't take much longer than I originally expected.
Joe Payne
Well, I can't speak for everybody else, but in my case, I think I have to admit, if I'm self-reflective, to a little bit of hubris. I really thought I could come in there and make it happen, and it would be pretty easy. I'm a smart person, and I'll figure it out, and dah, dah, dah. So, like I said, it's humbling, but also it's exciting. What happens? When I started, I never thought there'd be a pandemic. That was a game-changer, and I didn't appreciate some of the changes that would happen around me.
I think part of what we all assume is a static environment. It's going to be the same, and we just have to fix stuff in two or three years, but the environment isn't static. It's constantly changing and evolving itself. As you pursue your mission, you have to do a lot of things on the sides and the front. And so it's always hard, like you said. I think it's more that we think statically as opposed to everything's going to change as we're in the middle of this transformation.
Clint Betts
Who could have predicted COVID and all of that? That was a crazy few years. By the way, are you based in Washington? I see your background. Are you based in Washington, DC?
Joe Payne
I live and grew up in Washington, DC. I'm not part of the government and have never worked for the government. I've been-
Clint Betts
That's a great disclosure.
Joe Payne
I've had a security clearance in my role as a software security person, but I always like to tell because people ask, "Oh, you must work for the government." It's like, "No, I don't." Our company is actually based in Minneapolis and then we have offices in DC and we have an office in Colorado, and I commute fairly frequently up to Minneapolis where most of our employees are.
Clint Betts
Why Minneapolis? How did that end up being the headquarters?
Joe Payne
Well, as I mentioned, I was recruited by the venture capitalists when the founding CEO had left about a year earlier, and they were looking for a new CEO. The original founding team was living in Minneapolis, which is a good place to build a software company. I really appreciate the people in Minneapolis. We have really strong tech and engineering folks up there and for not a lot less money, but a more rational spend than, say, if you were in San Francisco.
Clint Betts
Probably a better quality of life for the employees, too, right?
Joe Payne
Great quality of life for the employees, Land of 10,000 Lakes, and a lot of recreation. People that work hard, but they also have good lives too. So that's something that's important to me.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Joe Payne
That's a really interesting question because I don't think there is a typical day for me. One of the nice things about being the CEO is that you can have someone who is sort of a right hand, like a chief of staff or executive assistant, and I have had that same person for about 17 years. Her name is Julie, and Julie and I tackle every day what things need to be tackled this week, this month, in the next quarter, or today. And it's really a luxury, to be honest, to have somebody help you think through that because when you're in the throes of a product marketing plan, and you're into it up to your eyeballs with your marketing team and listening to all the different ideas and plans, sometimes you might forget that there's somebody or something that needs to be dealt with over here. And so she does a great job of making sure that I stay focused.
In terms of basic habits, though, I mean I get up every day and walk my dog. That's something that's going to happen every day that I'm in town. I'm going to work out every day. I learned a few years ago, and a bunch of CEOs are like this too, that for people that travel a lot, going to the gym was never really an option because it's always like the gym's different in every hotel and some hotels don't have them or they have a bad one, then it messes up your routine. And so I said to myself, "Well, there's always a floor." And so, in the last 25 years, my entire exercise routine pretty much consisted of pushups and planks and sit-ups and exercises that I could do in a hotel room or out of town or in any place, so there's really no excuse. Someday, when I retire and the gym is right around the corner, I'll end up going to the gym. But I found out that it was too much of an excuse when I'm on the road to be like, "Well, I can't work out because they don't have my right gym equipment."
Clint Betts
Do they have the right equipment? What do they use? All that type of stuff. Do they have a Peloton?
Joe Payne
I'm a big Peloton rider, so I've gotten into that, and I've learned to find Pelotons in the cities that I go to. We have two at Code42, as an example, and of course, I have one at home. But again, back to my regular day, there's not much that's regular. I tend to meet with my teams a lot; I'm a big communicator. I think the surest sign that you are walking into an unhealthy company is when you ask, "Tell me about the executive team meeting. When does it happen?" And everyone will say, "Oh, it happens every week on Monday." It's like, "Well, when was the last one you guys had?" "Well, it was like three weeks ago. We skipped it last week, and we didn't have this," or whatever. And so I'm religious about meeting every week. I usually do it on Tuesday because everyone hates Monday, so if you put the executive team meeting on Monday, my preference is Tuesday afternoon, but we at Code42 do it on Tuesday morning right now and just get that cadence that's regular.
Then, you take that weekly cadence of that team meeting, and you turn that into every six weeks. I want to make sure I'm doing it all hands in front of the company, and then every quarter, we're going to do our quarterly business reviews, but we're also going to do our larger update for the company. And then every six months at Code42, we bring everybody from every place together and do either a global kickoff at the beginning of the year or a mid-year kickoff in the middle of the year. But I think that cadence is really important for a CEO to tell people what you should expect and sort of fall into those habits. And as long as you don't let it get out of hand so that you're only just doing meetings all the time, I think it's super helpful. And I do the same with my directs, that we meet weekly. I meet some of them every other week because they're either more experienced or don't need the activity, but I try to keep a regular cadence.
Clint Betts
Another thing we were talking about earlier was who could have predicted COVID and the pandemic nine years ago. Another thing that you probably could have predicted but maybe wasn't at the forefront of your mind nine years ago was AI and artificial intelligence, and in particular, in your industry, that must be a major challenge, both useful and a threat.
Joe Payne
Yeah, no question. Listen, and I want to be clear on this. I'm not an industry pundit, I'm not an expert in AI, but when every industry pundit is saying, "This is the biggest thing since sliced bread," you pay attention. We are incorporating AI in our software, and we are watching how our adversaries are using AI, and in our case, our adversaries; that's a strong word; we try not to use that word when we talk about insider threats because they're our employees, they're our friends, they're our colleagues, but we're also watching how they use AI. So, a couple of things we've done at Code42: first, we built a model using machine learning that essentially helps us identify if a document is a personal document or if it's a corporate document. It's just one more data point we look at. So if you're moving that to an untrusted location, let's say you're moving something to Dropbox from your company machine, we're not just going to block that movement.
We're going to let that movement happen, and then we're going to do a whole bunch of analysis on that and say, "Well, here's what we know about this person. Here's what we know about their previous activity. Do they use Dropbox regularly or not use Dropbox regularly?" And then also we're going to use this AI model we built to say, "Does it look like corporate data or does it look like personal data?" Because we will look at the source of where it came from. Maybe it came out of ADP, and if it came out of ADP and they're just a regular employee and our model says it looks like a W2, then we're not going to do anything. Nobody's interrupted; nobody's time is wasted. But if they're an HR employee and it comes out of the ADP system and that looks like a corporate document, maybe a list of salaries or whatever, we're going to investigate that and make sure that gets bubbled up to the top for our clients. So we're using AI.
The other thing we're doing is because our customers, end users, and employees are using the AI models a lot in risky ways; we've built specific capabilities to see if somebody is moving data to one of the AI engines like Open AI or the Microsoft engines or whatever. And we flag that with a separate category that most of our clients would rate very highly, such as, "Hey, this is a critical event. Somebody moved data into an AI model." So we're kind of watching it from all different perspectives. I think it's security where AI is really... and I want to be clear on this in security: we've been using AI for years.
In fact, I had the CISO, chief information security officer of Booz Allen, say to me at the beginning of a call, "Joe, if you mentioned the term AI or machine learning at the beginning of this call, I'm hanging up." Now, that was three years ago when he said that because people were so sick of hearing from security companies about how we use AI, etc., That was three years ago. Today, if you're in a sales call with any kind of security team and you don't mention AI or machine learning, then you're out of the process. So it's funny how these things go because we have been using these capabilities and these tools for a long time in security.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Hey, what are you reading? What reading recommendations would you have? So I guess that's a two-part question. What are you reading right now, and what are some of the books you would recommend to our community?
Joe Payne
So right now I am reading a book called Eruption, I hate to admit that, from Michael Crichton. It's Michael Crichton's latest book.
Clint Betts
Don't hate to admit. That's sweet.
Joe Payne
Well, it's not as good as I was hoping it would be, but I'm one of those stubborn people who, basically, once I start a book, don't give up on it. And so I'm not saying I'm recommending it to you guys. Let me pull back on the recommendations, too, because I have books that I feel so passionately about that I want to share. And I'll tell you what, the best books I've read recently are Demon Copperfield and the Covenant of Water. Those are the best fiction novels I've read. Fantastic. If you haven't read Covenant of Water, you should read that. If you haven't read Demon Copperfield, it's also a really impactful book and just a great read. It will get you every day to be like, "When can I open my book?" But on the business side, I'm so passionate about a couple of books.
One is Good to Great. It's literally the best business book I've ever read, bar none. Everybody who is a CEO should read this book. And if you ever get the chance to meet, listen to, or work with Jim Collins, you should absolutely do it. I've been fortunate enough to meet him a couple of times, and then also I tried to get him to come to work with me at Code42, but he's solving the really big problems for big companies. His team was great, and they actually gave us some advice and were helpful, but I couldn't convince him to come over for a full engagement. The other one that's really helpful if you're trying to make a change is a book called Switch. Switch is a book about how to make change happen when change is hard. It was written by the Heath brothers, H-E-A-T-H. I love that book so much, and it was so impactful to how I was doing things at Code42 and at Eloqua, my last company, that I actually had one of the authors join my advisory board, and it was a pretty fun experience for him, too.
So again, I believe in it. Then, listen; every CEO should have the basics of sales strategy. I learned about Sandler's Selling Effect in my early thirties. The book on that one is called You Can't Teach a Kid How to Ride a Bike at a Seminar, which is a funny title, but it also teaches you the basics of Sandler Selling. But if you do the Challenger Sale or whatever, every CEO needs to know that stuff because, at its core, being a CEO is sales. You're selling constantly all kinds of different constituencies. The very recent one that was written by the guys who wrote the Challenger Sale is called The Jolt Effect, J-O-L-T. And that one is a good one, too. It's a good read right now. So, most business books are not worth the paper that they're printed on, but I would tell you that those four business books, Good to Great, Switch, and the Sandler Book and then The Jolt Effect, are all worth reading.
Clint Betts
I think you're absolutely right about Good to Great. It's kind of unbeatable. That's a book that will last forever.
Joe Payne
I was teaching a class at American University in their business school, and it was not the entrepreneur of the first class, but it was now that you have a business going. It was called Growing Small Businesses. Basically, how do you take it from after you started it to the next step? And it was the first class I'd ever taught at the college level, and I was like, "What's the book? What's the syllabus?" And they go, "Why are you looking at us for that? You're the professor. You pick the book, you pick the syllabus." And I was like, "Really? I pick it?" Obviously, that's obvious now, but I'd never taken a class like this before. I was like, "Okay, so I'm picking Good to Great," and they were like, "Great." I was like, "Wow, okay." So Good to Great was the book that I taught for that class, so that's how strongly I feel about it.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. In your opinion, what are the three most important traits for a leader to have?
Joe Payne
I don't think there's any one way of doing leadership, first of all. So, I think I can share with you what's been successful for me, but there are so many different types of successful leaders out there. But what's worked for me is to be three things. It's like being authentic, being hyper-transparent, and then being relentless in the pursuit of better. So I talk about that last one a lot with my team. So let me sort of break each of those down for you from where I'm coming from. So, when I talk about being authentic as a leader, it means you have to live the values that you espouse for your team. So that means demonstrating consistently that even when it's hard, you stay true to the company culture and the values that you set for the company. And so an example of that is one of our parts of our culture is a team first. We put the team first; we put the team goals first. Okay, so you can say that, but how are you actually being authentic on that? Well, we judge every employee; their bonus is based on how the company does and our company's goals. We'll have three or four goals every six months, and we're like, "Based on hitting these goals, everyone gets their bonus," and that means I get paid the same way as a software engineer gets paid or a marketing person gets paid. And there's a lot of times when the board will come and say, "Well, Joe, we have this plan for you; you'll have a different plan." And for me, I'm like, "No, what I'm getting my team to do, I want to be part of it too, and we're going to lose and win together." And so the same rules apply to them as they apply to me.
And so a very tactical example of that at our company is that I also learned as a CEO, again, sidebar kind of conversation here, that every time I was having major HR issues with an employee, literally 99% of the time when there's a big incident, there's alcohol involved in that. And so I learned, I started something in my last company. I said, "You know what? We're going to have two drink tickets at our company events, and then if you want to have more drinks than that, then that's on you and whatever." But we literally hand out tickets to people as they come in the door. People that are big drinkers don't respond well to that. They get upset, "Oh, this is crazy. I can't believe you're limiting me." But what happens is people come out of the woodwork, they're like, "Yeah, I don't drink. My dad was an alcoholic; my mom was an alcoholic. "
And they're so grateful that there's a mocktail and that it's not a culture. We don't call it happy hour anymore; we call it social hour. And so it's little things like that. Sorry for the segue, but the long story is sometimes I'll walk into one of our events, and they'll hand me two drink tickets, and then somebody thinking that they're doing the right thing will come over, and they'll be like, "Hey, Joe, you're the CEO. Here's two more drink tickets," and I'm like, "Yeah, no. I'm going to live in and have the same environment and the same expectations and be held to the same standards as all of you guys, and that includes the two drink tickets, but it also includes the expense policy, and I'm staying in the same hotel as you guys are staying in, and I'm doing the same things you guys are doing. So I think again, if you're going to be authentic, that's really important.
As far as transparency goes, that's my second one. That's a personal value. I don't expect everyone to live the same way I do on that, but I tell everybody everything because I've learned that if the employees know why they're trying to do things and why we're trying to get there, even if it's stuff they don't want to hear, even if it's bad news. When I first hire employees that come work for me, a lot of times they're like, "Ooh, we don't want to say that. We don't want to tell people that, that will demoralize them." I'm like, "No, it doesn't. It doesn't demoralize them." They need to know the same problems we're grappling with. They need to understand we're dealing with this problem so we can harness them to solve it.
And it's more demoralizing when the employees know there's a problem and the executives pretend like it does not exist, and we've all worked in companies like that. And so I like to share everything with my team. The funniest example I could think of was my first day on the job at Code42; I did what I always do. I have a big all-hands, and I said, "Here's my name, here's what I've done. Here's why I'm here. Here's what I'm excited about, here's what I'm worried about," and then I'll take any questions, and there are no questions that are off the table. And then I got a couple of questions that were like, "How many kids do you have?" Whatever, and I told them all that story. And then the third question was, "How much cash do we have in the bank?"
And I was like, "$6.5 million, something. I think $6.5. it's $6.5, right?" I look over the CFO, and he's just like this. There's this audible murmur in the crowd. And I kind of look around like this: I go, "Is that not what you expected?" And the person who asked the question goes, "No one was ever willing to tell us that." I go, "We got plenty of cash. Cash is not our issue. I'll probably raise a bunch more cash. I'll tell you what our issue is, and it's this." And it was like it didn't cost me anything to do that, but what that earned me was trust. Why wouldn't I trust our employees to know where we are? Because, by the way, if we're going to run out of cash, I feel like they should know. I feel like they should know. But also, if we have tons of cash, we have plenty of cash. That was not an issue. They should know that, too. There's no hiding it. So, I'm just a big believer in being transparent.
And then I think the last one is you're not going to be successful as a CEO; I like to phrase it as the relentless pursuit of better because people that talk about the pursuit of perfection, there's no perfection. And life changes, and everything changes, but if you're constantly making everything better, it's exciting. It's really exciting. And we have a whole set of values at Code42 and one of them is to do it right, and part of doing it right is being a positive source of energy for the team. So we actually talk to our employees about, "Hey, you're not going to be a positive source every day of your life. We get that. Some days you're going to have to suck energy from others on the team, but overall, you should be a positive source of energy for the team."
And that positivity enables the relentless pursuit of better because it means you can constantly question what's happening without people thinking that you're just being a negative person. You can have blameless postmortems where you say, "Hey, this thing went sideways. Let's dive into why it went sideways," and everybody gets into it and gets excited about how we solve that problem. The loss of a customer can be devastating. Or it can be like, "Wow, let's figure out why we lost them so we don't lose ten more and really dig into it." And I think one thing that's different is that I got acquired once by a company. I'm going to leave their name out of it for now, but the CEO, the president, told me, she said, "Joe, we only care about the engineers. We care about the engineers and the salespeople. We don't really care about anybody else."
And I was like, "Wow," because it's so against everything I believe. Every part of the business matters. And so when I talk about the relentless pursuit of better, I'm talking about HR, facilities, legal, sales, marketing, and improvement is contagious. So if you see the HR team, three people, four people, they're trying to build a better system for HR, they're trying to serve their customers better, who are all the employees, and you look around, and you see the facilities team who's not satisfied with the building we have or how it works or the lunch they're bringing in, but they're actively trying to make things better, that kind of vibe can be contagious across the organization. And I think it goes with one of the maxims that I use a lot, which is to see the truth for what it is, but not worse than it is. So, we need the ability to engage and see that we can do better than this and not have to worry about it. We don't want to say that this thing is not perfect because it'll be upsetting, or we'll insult somebody, or whatever. I think that's super important. And I'll close that relentless part with the last thing, which I think is the first lesson I can remember from my mom. And my mom said, "Can't ever do anything." Can't do anything. And I remember her saying to me that as a kid all the time because, "I can't do this, I can't do that," and we'd always get that back. And so that, good for you, Mom, it stuck with me, and it's one of those things that I bring with me to the CEO table, which is that I like big challenges.
I like taking things on. I love the relentless pursuit of better, and I think people who work in companies that I lead like that, too. And if they don't like it, they tend to say, "You know what? This is not my vibe," and they flush out, and we shake hands, and they go, and that's okay. Every culture is not going to be the same, and that's perfect because we're all different, so you should find the culture that you like working in. It makes me sad when people say, "I don't like my job." I'm like, "Well, go somewhere else because there's a job out there that you will like; you just got to find it."
Clint Betts
You mentioned something earlier that I think is really interesting and we don't talk about enough as a business community, and that is the effects of alcohol and the downsides of that, incorporating that into the work environment. That is a really interesting thing that you've done there to limit the effects that that might have. I think you're absolutely right, that most HR issues usually stem from that.
Joe Payne
Look, whenever I tell other CEOs this, they just go, "Oh, I can't. There's no way I can get that past my team." And also, in the high-stress jobs that we have, a lot of us drink. But my dad was an alcoholic, and there's a lot of that that I'm careful about, And there's a lot of religions, by the way, that don't drink, and so you are limiting your ability to be a place that's welcoming to everyone if you overemphasize that. So I'm one of those people that I believe, "Hey, I want to be here. If you want to have a couple of drinks at social hour, I'm good with that, too, but I want it to be welcoming for everybody. And so you have to be intentional if you're going to do that." When we first started it, I told the HR team, "Hey, I want to have a mocktail." And they were like, "Oh yeah, whatever," and then it didn't happen. And the next time I literally came, I was tough with them. I was like, "Look, you guys have failed because you didn't do that." We started doing that, and the results have been fascinating. We've had some happy hours where the mocktails outsell; they're free, and they're out-picked up versus the nondrinks. And so it's just a good reminder that the world doesn't revolve around that, and the company needs to be cognizant of that, and they really need to be cognizant of that. So anyway, it works for us. And I think again, there are people, well, you'll laugh at this. When I first took over Code42, there was a keg in the company. In the developer's area, they had a keg, and they'd be like, "Well, the developers like to have a beer at three in the afternoon," and I was like, "What? No, we're not doing that." So I was very unpopular with a number of people at the beginning of my tenure when I took the keg away, but you know what? I think again, it's the unseen people that weren't complaining, and now it's a more welcoming environment, and they're not worried about being sexually harassed because people say stupid things when they drink too much. So I don't know, little things. Building your culture is all about lots and lots of little things. One of the things that we are now at Code is that we're an on-camera culture. And so people chuckle at that, but it's like look, we're so remote all the time that if I don't enter, I don't know, 70, 80% of communication is me looking at you and looking at are you smiling? Are you angry? Are you whatever?
And if you're going to be on the call, you're on camera. If you've got to be off-camera, then get off the call. Now, that doesn't mean, "Hey, I got to go off-camera for a second and do this." Great. I come back in; I turn it on. We're not crazy about this stuff, but we also are like, "If you're going to be on the call, don't lurk in the background. Be present," and little things like that are things that set your culture. As I interact with other companies now, it's funny to see that not everybody operates. Everybody's got their own way of doing things.
Clint Betts
What are some apps or products or tools that you use on a daily or consistent basis that you couldn't live without?
Joe Payne
Slack. Everybody's the same on that. There's nothing that's super interesting there. Look, my phone, my watch. I'm a communicator by trade, so texting and Slack are by far the most important. We use Salesforce, and we couldn't live without it. We love our product. We're in our product. One of the great things that COVID did for me was that it allowed me to get much more into the details of our product and learn how to demonstrate it or do a demo myself. And so I was finding during COVID, I could call CISOs or email CISOs and be like, "Hey, will you take a 10-minute meeting?" And they're like, "Sure. I'm sitting at home doing nothing." I started demoing the product to all these CISOs, and it's gotten me a lot more engaged with our own product.
I couldn't live without our own product. I love our product. It's so good. It's so easy to use, and so empowering for other organizations, and it's so in line with our culture of securing collaboration. Culture is our mission, and we take it very seriously. We really think about the people who want to collaborate and share, and let's not get in their way because there are a few malcontents who are going to do the wrong thing. So, the example I used earlier with you on Dropbox is a good one. When we first go in, companies say, "Oh my God, we see all these people moving things to Dropbox. We didn't know that was happening. Your products really showed us that's happening." I'm like, "Yeah." And then they'll say, "So we're going to cut off network access to Dropbox." And I go, "Okay, but let me just talk to you about that for a second. Do you have any people here you think that go to church?
A lot of church groups use Dropbox to share information and move things. Do you have any soccer kids that play soccer? Because a lot of those teams share all that data on Dropbox. Now, do you want your employees not to be able to access that when they're at work from their work computer? Because that could inconvenience them quite a bit." And so it is an example of you not needing to do that. By having our product, we can watch it, and we can score it. If it becomes a real problem, we can notify you of that, but we can allow the employees to actually just be productive and access some of their personal repositories without over-indexing. Let's turn this into Fort Knox and not let people be productive humans. So I'm a big user of that. I'm trying to think what other tech. You got anything that you use that maybe I didn't bring up, Clint?
Clint Betts
No, no, that's great. I don't have any specific app or anything, but obviously, we all live in Gmail and Slack, all of these various things, or Microsoft, depending. You have to do one of those two things. Finally, let me finish here. We ask everybody the same question to end the interview, and that is at ceo.com; we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Joe Payne
I love this question. It's a great question. There are two people that need to be mentioned, and the first one is a gentleman named Bruce Payne, who has the same last name as me but has zero relation. Bruce was a professor of public policy at Duke University when I was a junior, and I was a work-study kid, so paying my way through college. I had a job at P&G coming up in the summer, and I was two days away from leaving. Bruce said to me, "Listen, Joe, what are you doing this summer?" And I told him, he said, "You're not doing that. What you're going to do is you're going to go and set up a leadership internship program at Washington DC for next summer." And I was like, "I don't even know, what are you talking about? I'm 20 years old; I'm not qualified to do anything like that." He says, "Here's what you're going to do. You're going to figure out who the best-run nonprofits are in the DC area and think about it this way, Joe. If they're great nonprofits, they must have great leaders because they don't have resources; they don't have funding. They're fighting intangible problems. These are the biggest issues, and if they're being successful, they must have a great leader. I want to do an internship with that leader next summer. Go. Oh, and by the way, I can make it a work-study job for you, so you'll get paid to do this." And I was like, "Okay." But I went back to DC, and Bruce gave me no direction other than that what I just told you. He didn't look over my shoulder. I had to figure out who the best-performing not-for-profits are.
So, I had to go figure that out. And then I had to go knock on doors and be like, "Hey, can I meet with you?" And they're like, "Why do you want to meet with us? Do you have money?" I'm like, "No." And then I pitched them on, "Hey, you're the best leader. We want to bring an intern up. We put most of our interns in the public policy department on Capitol Hill, but those aren't the best leaders," and that was Bruce's point on leadership. He was teaching about leadership. And so I went, and that program still runs to this day, and that taught me a lot about leadership in general in terms of giving people rope, giving people room, and really challenging people without getting in their business and also making a long-term impact. So thank you, Bruce, for that, and I wouldn't be where I am today without him. The last one I want to give just props to is a guy named Brad Willison. So, I was fired by a mercurial CEO. He hired me as president to be his number two person, and less than a month into the job, he decided he didn't want a number two person, and he fired me less than a month into the job. And everyone, including my wife, assumed I must have done something really bad. I must have done something wrong or committed some crime or done something, and so nobody would touch me with a 10-foot pole. Brad, who was a venture capitalist, would meet me for lunch. We talked through jobs, and he offered me a job.
That job turned out to be as the CEO of Eloqua, which was a software company that is sort of globally known today, but we built over $800 million of value over the next six years together. It was a 14X for our investors, and all our employees did great. it was one of the best places that I've ever worked, and people will tell you it was one of the best places they've ever worked in. So sometimes you need to take a chance on somebody, even if it looks like they've got a little dirt stain on them, and I'm grateful to Brad for doing that for me. And I am always looking to pay what both of those two did for me, pay that back to the next generation that's coming along.
Clint Betts
Joe, thank you so much for coming on. Seriously, it's been a real honor. It's been a pleasure.
Joe Payne
Listen, you and I could talk for the next four hours if we want to go through culture and leadership and values, and we've just barely scratched the surface, so I'm thrilled to be here. I appreciate the platform and I love what you guys are doing.
Clint Betts
Of course. Come back on. We'll make it a series.
Joe Payne
I'd love to do it.
Edited for readability.