From EdTech to CyberTech: Justin’s Parallel Entrepreneur Path

Justin Beals

60% of data breaches are usually initially instigated through a social engineer. They're just talking to another human being and getting them to do something that they shouldn't have done. And so the real issue with cybersecurity is not so much whether or not the firewall works, it's whether my team understands what their jobs are and how to do it effectively.

Mark Cleveland

If the Internet was 10X, what's happening in the next 30 to 90 days is a 100X impact on the way we think and engage with ourselves, our lives, our customers, our businesses.

Justin Beals

If the internet was 10x, what's happening in the next 30 to 90... it's going to affect 90,000 companies in the United States alone that are on the GSA list. And it's a set of 130 requirements that you need to practice, prove, validate and score and submit an assessment to the government to win your deal. So the ROI is revenue. The things that you're working at will come true if you keep working at them. I can't tell you when. I can't tell you at what level of come true-edness it would be.

Mark Cleveland

Our guest today is Justin Beals, the co-founder and CEO of Strike Graph, a security compliance platform, helping businesses cut through complexity and earn trust faster. Justin is a serial entrepreneur. We're probably going to argue about that today with deep expertise in AI, cybersecurity, and education tech or ed tech. He's scaled multiple ventures, including Roundbox Global, Next Step, and Koru. Justin is a fellow podcast host with Secure Talk Podcast over 200 episodes. He's also a mentor for developers and engineers helping develop cybersecurity talent and a creator who leads with the heart and builds with purpose. Justin, welcome to The Parallel Entrepreneur.

Justin Beals

Thanks for having me, Mark, I'm really glad to join.

Mark Cleveland

You've got so many of these successful companies that you've started, built, scaled, sold. I'm curious, how do you identify opportunities and decide which ones, which ideas are worth pursuing?

Justin Beals

How do you identify opportunities and decide which ones, ideas are worth pursuing?

Yeah, I've certainly gotten better at it over the years. A couple of things that I look for from a problem space perspective for building a business. think First is, know, like personal experience, have you experienced this problem? Do you know about this problem? You can look at old software development days and be like, I'm missing a tool here or missing some piece of infrastructure on through to business, like a business solution that you're looking for. One thing that I always ask that I think doesn't get asked enough is before I think there's a good opportunity for a venture, I'm often curious if people are already paying for a solution and what the model for them paying for that, because this is a business fundamentally at the end of the day.

And if people are already paying, they have some concept of the value of the thing, it's a lot easier to launch a solution. I think the third thing certainly is, what's the addressable market look like? Sometimes it's really funny math, getting from like, this is who I think our audience is to who we could sell to helps. But really you just want a big enough market.

At the end of the day, you're going to be wrong usually. But if it's big enough, then you can play. And so you do use those levers, right, Mark? Like sometimes it's not a venture capital backed business. That's not what you're looking for. You're not going to try and scale it up to $100 million. So you should re-lever that. It might be less risky for a brand new solution to hit the marketplace if you aren't planning to sell into a massive market. But I think those are some of the fundamental things I look for.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah, total addressable market. And we get eyes big as saucers when we kid ourselves that it's this big. And in fact, it's not. But you don't really know it until you study it, press out that. And you talked about risk. So how do you how do you identify risk and adjust?

Justin Beals

Yeah, certainly when we were thinking about Strike Graph and looking at Strike Graph early on five six years ago, I was just investigating and researching the problem space. a couple different paths cropped up for us. One of the alternate paths to what we went down is the thing called vendor risk management or a third-party risk management.

And there were some really powerful companies in the space that had grown to like hundred million in revenue very quickly. And we're like, wow, that's so interesting. But as we, you know, talked about it, we were like, well, what's their competitors? And what we realized is that their competitors were actually industry standards that were being written and designed and put out into the marketplace. And that those industry standards would ameliorate some of these platform work that's happening because everyone would want to compare apples to apples and not unique company to unique company. And so that was a risk, right? That the competitive landscape was more unique than what we thought. It wasn't just another business selling a solution. It was actually the trend of the marketplace was competitive to the idea of a third party risk management platform with security questionnaires. And so I think that was important because we decided to go the route of saying, no, we'll help an organization meet a framework, not, you know, run security questionnaires for third party vendors.

Mark Cleveland

So let's talk about a framework for a minute. As an entrepreneur, I'm running a company that is trying to deploy inventory controls and just warehouse logistics. And there's a lot of value in that data and a lot of insight that I can draw from it for my own company. But I also could, there's an attack surface there.

Justin Beals

Yeah. Right.

Mark Cleveland

And let's talk a little bit about how data should be valued, how security should be evaluated, and how does that fit into your framework?

Justin Beals

You know, from a history perspective, when we look back at this particular space, a long time ago, one of my first professional computer science jobs was for British Telecom. And I was a lowly security engineer. And I just started, I remember my boss telling me this story. He said, Justin, if we don't get hacked this year, they're going to cut our budget. And if we do, they'll raise our budget. This is a whole perverse set of issues around security.

And so, you know, what happened is, is that we had a lot of teams basically making their own decisions about what security to put in place. And that could both be like cyber security, like digital security, as well as physical security, who can come in and out of the door. But it was their best guess about what was best for them. And there was a whole methodology, we take risk, and we decide what that surface area is.

There was some good practices. But the challenge was is that it still wasn't very comparable. Everybody was doing different things. And especially when you're everything from IBM deciding which vendors they could buy services from, it's not comparable. And I've seen this in other industries. We saw it in we start designing these frameworks of measurement. We're saying, hey, I want to measure the security practices and posture of an organization.

We saw this in education and standardized testing. When we did No Child Left Behind, we went from a non-measurement, like how's the teacher doing, to every kid's gonna take a national test every two years. And we're gonna measure from the child to the state, how they did against a framework of learning outcome. That's one of things that helped in this problem analysis space is, I'm a little full circle, Mark, I saw a solution for a problem space that we were dealing from an adjacent market that had dealt with it in a really complicated way and knew that we could solve the same problem here for security.

Mark Cleveland

Man, I think that's precisely the root of paralleling, where we're recognizing and seeing in one industry challenges, solutions, and thought processes that can apply to a completely different problem set.

Justin Beals

Well, it's interesting because I think you could use a couple terms for how this works well, systems thinking. I think about it from a data model What are the constituent data elements? And is there a similar data model that I've seen in another type of problem space? And how did that data model work effectively? At the end of the day, what you're trying to coalesce around is really like a concept of what is the relatable activities in education? There are lesson plans, there are quiz questions, there's student activity, there's a quantitative analysis and we can aggregate that data up. And when we started looking at security, we've figured out that what there is, there's a constituent set of activity. There's risks we're mitigating, there's controls we're operating, there's evidence we're gonna collect to validate that. At the end of the day, we need to map that activity back to a framework assessment.

So that we can say, are they meeting A, are they meeting B, are they meeting C? It is that simple, really. But from that, and I think we lose sight of this, a good systems thinking, a core data model, a conceptualization of a set of relationships, you can build all kinds of things. This is how we're able to support 30 different frameworks on the same platform for security operations. This is how we're diving into AI, which functions as an internal auditor because we have a good concept of the data activity of security and are able to instruct those AI tools, those systems on how to assess. I'm on a rant here, but I'll give you one more little thing. I had a friend pull me aside one day and he said, Justin, there's a difference between the way you guys build product and solve problems and other companies that we see quite regularly.

You guys are a little more thoughtful upfront. And because of that, you have 10 years of innovation cycle on the same database architecture. Other companies will need to rework their entire infrastructure every three years because they started out with the wrong conceptualization.

Mark Cleveland

I think a problem in cybersecurity these days is that there are a lot of legacy systems that by themselves are being harvested and extended and maintained, but really need to be sunset because they can't move as fast as the market or as the tools that can be applied to them or frankly, as the attackers might have evolved in that same window of time. That's a significant challenge.

Justin Beals

You know, the other aspect of that is like the cybersecurity space has the flashiest products, right? Around, you know, They're like, I got a web application firewall and it detects SQL injections in the forms in my software and it's highly automated. Or you have like this resilient network solution that'll reroute traffic dynamically when someone tries to take you down or overload a server. Those are sexy. Don't get me wrong. They're really cool.

But 70% of data breaches are coming from a third party risk vendor. 60% of data breaches are usually initially instigated through a social engineer. They're just talking to another human being and getting them to do something that they shouldn't have done. And so the real issue with cybersecurity is not so much whether or not the firewall works, it's whether my team understands what their jobs are and how to do it effectively.

Mark Cleveland

Right, right. So you talk about this third party service provider. There's an ecosystem of primary providers, secondary providers, the government, the DOD being the client, let's say, for example, let's take a look at that. There's some new regulations that are being applied, some new standards. I think they're going to revolutionize how almost every business that interacts with any government supplier is planning.

Justin Beals

Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

How about let's talk about that for a minute.

Justin Beals

Yeah, and I think this gets back to entrepreneurialism in a way. One of the things to look for, I think, where is the tide moving? Because if you are running counter to the current of where things are going, your business will constantly be in friction. But if you're moving with the tide, it will lift. That's how you, I think, really get a business to go. What we saw was that organizations saw major data breaches happen, you know, via their vendors. And so they said, hey, we've got to adjust how we assess vendors. This came from another aspect where the SEC in writing Sarbanes-Oxley didn't want the banks to go sideways again. And part of that was IT general controls. Like, how are you from an IT perspective creating resilience inside your organization? And so then their vendors had to do it and then their vendors had to do it. So it infected the marketplace a little bit. We saw that trend.

And now we're picking out these trends that are happening in a lot of different countries. A big one is the cybersecurity maturity model certification is a new requirement starting at the end of Q2 for all new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. I mean, it's going to affect 90,000 companies in the United States alone that are on the GSA list. And it's a set of 130 requirements that you need to practice, prove, validate and score and submit an assessment to the government to win your deal. So the ROI is revenue. And maybe that's the other point about looking for problems, as I'm always really curious about the motivation and the pain point of the buyer. Like, it extreme? don't want you to just like to use me, I want you to need to use me. And I think that's been critical in helping build Strike Graph. And when I think about other ventures that I really want to scale in a similar way.

Mark Cleveland

So you're talking about lack of friction and actually going with the flow. Let's just go with the flow. I used to think that I would solve a problem that no one ever had solved before. And I'm swimming upstream. I'm exhausting myself. So maybe I ought to just go with the flow. And when we do that, we recognize a lot of synergies. And I think we're actually more observant about this river that we're in taking us downstream.

Justin Beals

Right, yeah.

Mark Cleveland

And we get to see, we get to be passengers and sort of watch what is happening on the left bank, what's happening on the right bank and above me and around me. So how is this flow of these trends in cybersecurity, how is it affecting business today?

Justin Beals

So how is this flow of these trends in cybersecurity? How is it affecting business today?

It can go both ways, right? You can be running against the current. When we first started the business five years ago, we were getting a lot of ask for a type of audit called SOC 2. We'd get a lot of early stage B2B SaaS companies that were trying to sell their SaaS platform into bigger companies.

And they'd be like, oh, they told me I need to get a SOC 2 audit. And when we were building five B2B SaaS companies every five days with five million in capital, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, Mark. It was so easy to pick up new customers. But when the capital markets died, that all died. And then not only that, they couldn't access new capital. And so now you're losing customers because they're just going out of business. There's nothing you can do about it.

And so we knew we were swimming upstream. We were against the current. Things were against us. You can feel it. And if you, get it, we all need to be hopeful. We need to be passionate about what we're going to accomplish and set goals that stretch us. But at the same time, recognizing which way the wind's blowing was really important. Luckily, cause I think we build enterprise grade software by default, our product like rocketed into the enterprise space really well.

And we've found a lot of opportunity. And when we deal with things like high-end frameworks or very rigorous ones like cybersecurity maturity model certification in the defense industrial base, we were really glad that a great platform, good systems thinking led to an opportunity to meet new demands in new marketplaces.

Mark Cleveland

Those demands might have been there before, but you were shooting fish in a barrel at first. And so you get addicted to that behavior, that marketplace, but that enterprise market was probably available to you previously. What do you think about that?

Justin Beals

I think it was. I'm glad we cut our teeth a little bit down market in a way. One thing that it unlocked is an ability to grow with a customer because we can solve problems at a smaller scale. We'll get an adoption at a really massive group like a U.S. Air Force adoption. And that usually starts out as a single adoption and scales up. There's multi-tenancy because we have that ability for them to feed on us as they have need. And because we built that help for small teams initially, you just had to have that vision that you're like, if a big company, a multinational company is actually a set of a hundred different small companies, how do they all work together on top of this solution? Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

Wow. So describe to me what your ideal customer profile is. So if you're listening to The Parallel Entrepreneur and you're saying, my gosh, I got to deal with cyber this and cyber that who, who is ready for and needs Strike Graph.

Justin Beals

Yeah.

There are a couple of things that really kick it off. One is that you'll need us if your customers are asking you to meet some security audit or assessment from a third party. That can be as simple as a SOC 2 or as robust as something like CMMC or FedRAMP. It's a big space.

We generally say that our best customers are also security minded. So when they're small teams, they might be dealing with very critical data and information like healthcare information, but security is a part of the focus of their business. That's how they sell what they do. They couldn't get adoptions if they didn't have good security in place. But then we go up to companies, I'd say in the 50,000 employee range, those are our biggest customers.

And they'll be multi-site, multi-tenant types of enterprise deployments. The fluidity of our ability to support those organizations has mattered in being able to move around the market. I'll tell you what I look for in a customer to know that I think they're going to be really successful with us. One is that they care about good security. If they are like, I want to do good security.

That's good for our business. They're have a lot of success with us. That's right. It was shared values. It sounds hokey, but it matters. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

Mission alignment. Yeah, hokey right up until it's not because you really don't care and you can't help them.

So you're sitting in the middle of this landscape where AI is moving at light speed and actually machine learning was the way, what we used to call it. And I'm curious between the data science landscape and you're, you're obviously in the center of a lot of data and I'm curious what you're seeing are the trends and how you're using, how you're leveraging this sort of trifecta of data science, machine learning and AI.

Justin Beals

Yeah. I have worked on these types of systems since we called it algorithmic programming, back when we were just dealing with good sorting algorithms, it's been a big part of the work. And certainly when I worked in education, natural language processing was something that we looked at deeply because we were trying to build really effective tools to help kids learn.

Almost all that is communicated through storytelling language and information transmitted in that We've had good models for things like summarization. Like I want to give you a whole set of data and I want you to summarize it. What we haven't had that is very new is the way the current large language models create a better language interface. The computer is better at interpreting what we send to it. And its synthesis is farther reaching.

Like it'll grab a broader set of data into the synthesis and the response. So what does that mean for us at the end of the day? What it means at the end of the day is that we're able to feed in data to these systems that can then do the analysis work that only humans used to be able to do. For us in our platform, the area of opportunity, Certainly we could build a little tool that says write me a policy, but you can do that on ChatGPT or Claude anytime you want today. It's not very hard. They have good analysis. But the tougher thing was to say, we have people that sit and look at a spreadsheet and click on each row of the spreadsheet where what we call an evidence item is included. And they look at that evidence item and say, Hey, was the firewall implemented in the right way? Yes, it looks like it was from the data that was provided. And so we worked at building a multi-step large language model that essentially performed that testing for our customers. We call it an internal auditor and it works in real time. So what we're seeing from an AI perspective is that there's a lot of value in specific solutions, right? Like we're solving this problem, the internal auditor problem. Today, you don't have enough staff to test all the things that you need to test. You're doing a sampling. You're testing one third of the things that should be tested. And if we can provide you a tool that tests everything, at whatever specification that you write, we have now scaled your team, three X from its coverage.

Mark Cleveland

And eliminated risks that were lurking because you didn't sample the right evidence.

Justin Beals

That's exactly right. I think that certainly, lot of this statistical analysis and testing comes from good science work done by accounting field and AICPA. But if you can get a machine to test it all, why not?

Mark Cleveland

We've talked about your experience in the educational space and how that informed you. And I'm super curious about mentoring as a topic.

You talked about measuring things in education and we're measuring things in cybersecurity and measurements are so important. And now we're talking about being able to measure the compliance, whether or not you're in compliance at a hundred percent scale. Right. So what strikes me is that we're still a bunch of humans in organizations. We're still a biological body, you know, masquerading as a corporation. And I'm I'm wanting to know how you are seeing mentoring at scale. How are you seeing people implement, measure, and try to address this human need that we have and a desire that we have to both offer and receive mentoring.

Justin Beals

In a very heartfelt way, there's been some amazing mentors for me. I'm always glad to share it back to those that ever ask. I think one of the deep joys of the work in entrepreneurialism over the years has been giving people an opportunity and watching them really shine in it. It's just amazing, you know, and right. Yeah I think it's intriguing when we think about learning at scale, know through mentorship, etc. Certainly when I was involved in the tech industry a big part of what we were doing was saying we're gonna deliver education at scale, you know, we're gonna we're gonna build all these

Mark Cleveland

It is the icing on the cake, right?

Justin Beals

learning management systems, we're gonna load a bunch of content on there. And we're actually gonna take a little bit of the human element out. The teacher is there for guidance, not to lecture, right, or engage quite so often. And we lost something in the learning modality through that. for me, I think there's maybe three legs to the stool.

One is that we have been able to scale really well is where can I get content and information? I'll give you one that I'm doing right now. I've always been really interested in electronic music for a long time. And I'm trying to put back together a couple of synthesizers and MIDI. And I'm constantly looking up YouTube videos and be like, OK, how do they get that thing to sound like that?

Mark Cleveland

Sweet, me too. A file or a Roland or what is that?

Justin Beals

I have a Nord Rack 2 that I'm just trying to figure out how to make the weirdest bass sounds I can. And it's a lot of from a scale perspective, and I take advantage of it too with Secure Talk, with opportunity to write leadership pieces or things like that, I think that's where the scale can come from. But it's very asynchronous or one-sided.

The second aspect has to be really human. That's the second leg of the stool, which is, hey, I have a colleague or a friend that's had high achievement. I have both friends that I lean on where I'm like, hey, I need advice. They can be board members. And so I'm increasing my social network for how and who I can talk to about what, and I'm opening up for people coming to me. And then the third leg of the stool, I think from a mentor perspective is practice.

You have to do the thing. I've talked to people in the past who are like, hey, I want to be a software developer. And I'm like, hey, that's great. You should learn to do it. You need to go and read this book and do these tutorials. And they'll come back to me six months later and I'll say, how'd it go? And they're like, I didn't do any of that, but I still want to be a software developer. Will tell me how to do it? I'll be like, you need to read this book and do these tutorials. Yeah, that's right.

Mark Cleveland

You gotta put in work.

Wow. Yeah. So the other day on the Parallel Entrepreneur Network, we were being facilitated by a genius and he stopped and asked a question and he said, how many people in this group are musicians? There's a lot of people in the network and literally all but two of them raised their hands that they were parallel entrepreneurs and musicians.

And then the second, I was shocked. I mean, I know a lot of these people. And of course I didn't know that, that trend or that reality was so complete. And then the next question was, well, is anybody here an artist or a painter? Well, the other two people raised their hand. So I'm loving this introduction of music in the term of something that motivates you, something that is creatively inspiring you.

Justin Beals

Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

How does that fit into your leadership experience as an entrepreneur?

Justin Beals

Well, one thing it probably does is it helps me decompress after our discussion as I could go just be like how's that kick drum sound, you know, focus on something else. That's right, yeah, I do

Mark Cleveland

It's a wonderful distraction.

Justin Beals

it gives me something to share with my team. A couple of us are into DJing or stuff like that. And I'll be like, oh, I'm working on this beat. What do you think? And, so that's been a good connector for the org. But I'll put this forward. You can tell me if you agree. One of the reasons that your concept of parallelism in entrepreneurship exists is that the creative muscle has to be exercised all the time. I can't just do it and get a business launch.

And then sit back and be like, I'm gonna stare at the PNL every day. Yeah, and so I need to exercise that creative muscle and I gotta find little ways in between the big boulder we're moving to keep that activity happening.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah, I love it. So true. Yeah, I love it. There's a concept in parallel entrepreneur where we're paralleling. How many things do you like? What's an average day in Justin's life look like? And how how would you apply the word paralleling to your life, your lived experience?

Justin Beals

Yeah, well, you know, I'm an I'm a morning person. think a lot of us type As are. And so I tend to get up and get the dog and go for a walk. And so I do think one of the first things is just setting my brain in kind of a quiet space to be like, what's the day going to be like? Or, you know, can I engage with it in an effective manner? What's one of my most stressed out about? Obviously, that'll be top of mind. And it might be the thing I need to focus on.

I take a little bit for breakfast and just settling in. I may consume some media or a book or something for a little bit, but usually by 8 a.m. I'm fully in the office and we're working. Usually in the afternoon or evening, I try to get some physical activity almost every day, you probably see the skateboards behind me. That's one of them. I have a cyclist and I do some distance kayaking out here on the water. And that's really important for mental health. And then usually in the evenings, I'll try and pull up something creative. It could be a coding thing. Like I want to work on this particular new technology I heard. It could be I'm working on a track a little bit, stuff like that. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

You're a cyclist too, right?

So every day has a meditative practice in it for you. That's what I'm drawing out of that, both a physical investment and a meditative behavior.

Justin Beals

Yeah, it's interesting. I deeply like the meditative thing. I don't sit cross-legged on the floor probably as often as I should. But I have a history with this. My first company I built, Roundbox Global, I was the sole owner of, and it was a services business. I built it to about 100 consultants in the company.

But I was just not in good shape. As a sole owner, everything felt like I was failing everyone, even though we were growing at like 10% a month sometimes. It was crazy. And then when 2008 hit, we saw the recession really impact the business on some level. And you're kind of self owning, and I've seen other executives like this.

Some friends I've lost due to this but of course like you're numbing the pain through going out drinking, overeating, not exercising. Everything's unhealthy. You know, it's just a bad bad cycle. And I sold that company somewhat out of pure emotional frustration. I was just evaporated. And I had a really good friend and we started doing yoga together as the, we took the company over to the new buyer. And I did that for a decade almost daily. Um, it was really cool form called Ashtanga, but it got to where it was like an hour and a half, two hour long practice every morning. I loved it. I carry that with me still, but I, I don't get to have it in every day, but I had to reset my own brain chemistry and how I wanted to live my life, how I wanted to stack the priorities and share time.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah. Wow. Yoga is a daily practice for me too. And I feel it when I'm not doing it. And I also think walking is a good meditation. I have a, I have a friend who, a business partner of mine, who, when we get together, we'll have a meeting at the cold plunge and sauna place and it takes an hour and a half, which is great. It needs to take an hour and a half. And it's a little bit of system shock followed by you know, the the heat and this this significant contrast and breathing exercises. Well, we still got our meeting in and we both got a reset and we're both shocked out of whatever pattern we're in. You know, I think these are important lessons to to try to draw with and from one another. In your business career, what would be some of the lessons that you think you like you really want to put out that our audience can benefit from?

Justin Beals

Yeah, one thing that I tell folks that are interested in founding a business and building a business is that I believe that companies are a lot like Jell-O in Tupperware. They really fill in the space that is available to them in the universe.

And it sounds a little woo-woo, as a friend of mine would say. But the truth is if I had an interest in building a company that was an adventure company where we would take people on trips that were a backpack through the desert or a rafting trip or something like business is only going to fill a certain thing. It shouldn't be $100 million a year business. It's not really what it's focused on.

It may be very localized. It may be more like a million or two. And it's used as a pejorative. I hate it. Someone might call it a lifestyle business. It's still a company. It's still got to make money. It's still got the same challenges. You still have to market and advertise it. You still have to build a great product. All of that work continues to matter. Making yourself feel less than because that jello filled the mold is wrong.

Mark Cleveland

Can I get an amen?

Justin Beals

So that's one thing that I try to say to folks. I love your idea. I think you should go after it. Be realistic. In old school days, we would have said, did you write a business plan? What's really possible? Is that sustainable? Is that something you want to do? If so, be an artist, like go for it. Absolutely.

Mark Cleveland

And so the mold has a certain volume that it can contain, and we're going to fill that with jello and then it's going to be a great dessert by itself and something that we can consume and love. But we're not trying to say, hey, that small cupcake had more or less value than the giant upside down bump cake that somebody else made, followed, of course, by some comparison to somebody's wedding cake. Right.

Justin Beals

Right. Yeah. And I get they all have different tiers of wealth, you know, that gets shared in, the same time, wealth is not always, you know, extreme wealth is not always the outcome of building these companies.

Mark Cleveland

I do think that we suffer as humans from this compulsion to compare. I've got some clients that will say, well, I did this and I shouldn't have done that. I should have done something else. I'm literally trying to shock them. I want to put them in a cold plunge and I want to shock them out of that's a rear view mirror.

Justin Beals

Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

There was great lessons, now what? That's not happening anymore. How visit yourself when you're being self-critical? How do you pull yourself out of that?

Justin Beals

Yeah.

Yeah, I probably I try to talk to myself like I talked to my teammates when I see them going through it too, which is, you gotta remember your wins, right? Like, believe me, I have a hard time. I'm like, I saw so and so did such and such or this this competitor happened to do this and and you're gonna feel less than. They put it out there so you would, is where the self awareness, I think matters, maybe full circle back to that.

Did we give ourselves time, a walk, a yoga practice, something mindful where we can be like, Hey, building the company in this way, in this environment, with this level of efficacy and have you been doing the things that you prioritize? Yes, you have, you know, that is you're achieving your goals and you need to take great pride in that, you know. And then recognize that you don't control the mold. That's, that's just the operating sphere. You know, that's where you make decisions.

Mark Cleveland

Let's dive in a little deeper because you say you don't control the mold, but you made some decisions about what the project is going to try to attempt. I'm going to build a cupcake. Now, if I think that cupcake is in fact a wedding cake, I've got a cognitive disconnect. But the mold is still the mold. The jello is still the jello. I don't know if jello and cakes actually work as a complimentary metaphor, but

Justin Beals

Yeah.

We'll get another food metaphor in before we're done here. Yeah, when I was thinking about one is I went through the problem. I was like, oh, I'm a CTO. I got to help my company get a SOC 2 audit accomplished. This is really painful. I see a lot of ways this could have been easier. OK, that's great. But now I'm like, but the next company I wanted to build, I did want to be venture capital backed. I did want it to have the ability to scale to 100 million in ARR plus. And so now those two things alone tell me that I need to research the mold as their opportunity to build a company of that size or their buyers in the marketplace. What do they pay today? How am I going to reach them? How much does is that going to cost? Right. So now I could start to say, what is the space? What does the volume look like?

And really read that volume in which I want to operate and see if it meets some of the criterion for engagement. I might have come away saying, guess what? This is not a venture capital backspace. There's not enough opportunity or growth here. They won't be interested. And I wouldn't want to take investor dollars. But it's a great, you know, 10 million, 20 million in recurring revenue type of space. And that leads a different investment strategy, who you need to work with, how you wanna go after the solution, what your ownership structure should look like, you start to respond to that.

Mark Cleveland

So you have a co-founder in this business. You described what it was like to be alone as a solo opener. We now fast forward. These are some lessons that you've applied to the business that you, the lived experience that you have called forward and that you've created so that that's what your reality can be like today. Talk about the co-founder relationship and then

Justin Beals

Talk about the co-founder relationship and then I'm curious about the venture capital relationship. A lot of people have good stories and bad stories about that and I'm curious about Certainly the sole owner thing was tough and I rarely advise it to anyone to do a sole ownership no matter what size of the business. I think partners keep you honest, co-founders fill in your gaps if you're looking for them in the right way.

Mark Cleveland

I'm curious about the venture capital relationship. A lot of people have good stories and bad stories about that, and I'm curious about

Justin Beals

That's probably one of those pretty common recommendations that I make on all the ventures is that it's a team effort. I think I'm just gonna dive in on this. is something I don't enjoy is founder worship. Like I get it. I love being a founder, but it's not that special. It's a lot of fun.

Mark Cleveland

It's not that easy, not that much fun, and at the same time.

Justin Beals

And really it's the team, right? Like I certainly can be a linchpin in how all that comes together, but it's just a pole. The tent is what makes the shape, right? Like we hold each other up together. I think a lot of investors have also recognized that having more than one founder is a more resilient way to build a company. And so they tend to expect it nowadays too.

My co-founder, Brian Barrow is absolutely an amazing individual. Really love building the business for him. And I think intriguingly though, Mark, one thing about the co-founder cycle or the partner cycle is that you may find that both are not always going to be with the business. And actually Brian, went off to do another venture a couple of years ago and he's doing really good and I'm, I'm glad for him. So I think that is another part of the partnership journey, you know, as you build these businesses is that people will come and they will go, they'll be a part of it at the right time. You need to recognize when it's not a good time to be a part of it or you're just not aligned.

Mark Cleveland

So your venture backers came with you and Brian as co-founders and invested and things change. I mean, maybe the only thing that's happening this day is change. And so explore the relationship of working with healthy venture backers.

Justin Beals

things change. Maybe the only thing that's happening this day is change.

Yeah, we've been lucky in my board members. They are amazing teammates. And I don't know how many other founders I talked to that have this impression of the people they work with, but they're so smart. And I love that they hold us to what's possible on a regular basis. And their advice has been mentorship for me and my team.

The thing that I noticed about raising capital from a traditional VC is that first off, they're very professional, but they're very transparent. You need to listen carefully. If you're a founder, these guys are looking at companies all the time and they might not understand yours as deeply as you do, but what they're talking about, the aspects of what their concerns are for the business matter, because they see them fail and succeed more than you will. They've seen more companies than I've ever founded for sure.

And so I think there's been a good process in raising capital of finding the smart people that fill a gap in our capabilities to be added to the board that really believe in what we're doing. My litmus test for that is, do they introduce us to leads? That's my biggest question is like, do we get a lead from them? That's really good. They definitely understand how this works. And then, they negotiate in really good faith in that they care that the nature of the deal is beneficial to everyone.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah, that resonates. I've had friends who took on venture money who then felt beholden and obligated and controlled. And then I've heard stories like this one where you take on a venture partner and they're companions. I think that's a, that may be a reflection of the entrepreneur and how they reacted to that kind of engagement. It's more likely a reflection on how the investor thought about defending and extending their investment in the business. Collaboration is so important and it is yet so rooted in an emotional experience. talk to me about the emotional experience of collaborating as a CEO with a team and investors and customers.

What is your collaboration superpower, Justin?

Justin Beals

What is your collaboration superpower, Justin?

I gained my superpower. My origin story on that is that my degree is actually in theater. I played with computers since I was a little kid, but I fell in love with theater in high school and I went to college for theater. And that is the crucible for teamwork. It's really hard because you know what happens when you get a bunch of actors together?

Drama, a lot of it. So being able to be a director, being able to be assistant, being able to be an actor, being able to just operate in that rhythm of having an idea, looking at a script, staging the script, getting to opening night, and then suffering the reviews, the audience. I fell in love with it. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

Wow, that's feedback on steroids.

Justin Beals

Yeah, now when I what I realized is I tried to work professionally in theater for a couple years and I was like, this is starting to get boring. I don't know if I want to do the Lion King. Is that building a company was really similar. And so I get that same juice of collaboration with like different people and different aspects of what they're dealing I talk to my CFO, when me and my chief product officer are working on our roadmap, when I'm working with our CRO or with an account exec on a sales opportunity.

That collaboration, thrive on it and I probably attract people that thrive on it similarly.

Mark Cleveland

So there is no typical day in the life of Justin Beals, the CEO of Strike Graph. There is swim lanes and moments of presence. And then I'm thinking this is core to paralleling. You are extraordinarily flexible.

Justin Beals

strike ground there is yeah, the gear change is a little tough. I did have like, you can have a hard meeting and then a meeting you're supposed to come in, it's like super joyful. And I'm like, you gotta give me two minutes. I've got to switch gears here a little bit.

Mark Cleveland

Well, two minutes is super power, brother. I've met a of people that fall apart between meetings like that and can't reframe. Yeah, that's it.

Justin Beals

Yeah.

I think they deserve it. I usually find myself in own mental process saying to myself, these people that you're talking to deserve the best that you can give them. Is this the best Justin? And trying to be like, no, I'm not centered and I'm not giving them what they need, either deep compassion, deep transparency, know, presence. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

present.

Justin Beals

Yeah. Yeah. And not always perfect. Of course, none of us are.

Mark Cleveland

No, but we're learning machines. At least that's the hope.

Justin Beals

And I love it. I mean, I couldn't imagine doing anything else. And the team is probably like, God, it's like too much energy. Does a guy ever like just take a second back? But it energizes me to watch them what they do, what they're thinking about, what the opportunities are and going out and executing it. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

So on a day-to-day basis then, what are you trying, what are you committed to right now of doing? I like to ask a little bit less of, or a little bit more of?

Justin Beals

a little bit less on or a little bit more on. think that on a day-to-day basis right now, I've probably done a lot of founder-led sales work, and I'm doing maybe a little less of that and a little more of partnership or strategic relationship work. So that has been somewhat of a mix. And it goes back and forth. It fluctuates. You know, a very big adoption might need a little more technical type sales, which I'm really helpful in. I think the other thing that has been an attempt to scale up my presence in the space, because I was kind of new to it. I have a big background, great network in enterprise education technology. I could have decided to build a business in that industry, but I wanted something new. I wanted to work in a different space.

But I'm a little new to the security space. I'm, I'm a certainly been around tech for my whole career, but I've never been a CISO before. And so a Secure Talk the podcast has been a great vehicle for me to learn from experts in this particular field and interview them. We just talked with the guy that figured out how to hack ChatGPT with prompt injection.

A very ethical hacker, so he let ChatGPT know, they've closed the bug, it's not available anymore. But having these deep discussions with other professionals and leaders in the field and trying to find more of them and make them an asset for the rest of the community, I think that's something I've been doing a lot more of as well.

Mark Cleveland

I like how you frame that as both a goal and action, you know, and you're putting it in motion by capturing these stories and sharing them with a community that you're contributing to. And so this sounds to me like a thing, right? You talk about scale and companies usually come to the opportunity to scale because they've got a thing, something that is a part of their core values.

Justin Beals

Mm-hmm.

That you're contributing to. And so this sounds to me like...

Mark Cleveland

How do you scale your company from X to Y to $100 million without losing that thing?

Justin Beals

I have a board member that is great about this. He's kind of about efficiency, you know, he's like, "Justin, you know you can earn one dollar and it costs you fifty cents or you can earn ten dollars and it cost you eight dollars like which was the better outcome at the end of the day?"

And so when we think about trying to go to scale, and probably this is true both as you're building a company and as we just think about any activity, we need to start with a core value. So before we ever go, how many people can we give this to? We need to make sure that we have a core value. On the podcast, for example, we wanted to see organic subscribers start to come to the podcast and want to take a listen.

We set a philosophy around core value. We said, when someone comes to listen, they've got to get valuable information out of each episode directly. In the fact that they gave us time, we gave them something valuable to learn. And so one of the things I say oftentimes about business today is that the best metric for core value is not on the amount of revenue you're generating, but the amount of retention you have going on because I mean the customer is staying with you over and over and over and over again, even better if you've got the right expansion, then it's prepared to scale. I don't care if you're earning a million dollars or, you know, a hundred thousand dollars. You don't have that flywheel going, it's not quite prepared. But now it's all about efficiency. Let's say I'm thinking about marketing. This is oftentimes where it comes in. My scale question is not about, you know, can I hire the same amount of resources in a linear fashion for the same amount of pipeline? My question is, I take the same number of resources and get double the pipeline? What is the action day to day that would change the pipeline out?

Mark Cleveland

What is the 10x in that opportunity? Right. I had a had a another one of the network meetings where somebody presented a problem and then the very, very perceptive entrepreneur said, what is the aha moment where you recognize that your customer has just flipped the switch and they see the value about your platform at that moment. What is it that happened? What is that aha moment? And the entrepreneur's answer was, well, we take all these multiple sources of information and solutions and insight. And all of our customers today have to have multiple files open on their screen in order to manage these multiple sources.

Justin Beals

What is it that happened? What is that aha moment? And the entrepreneurs answer was, well, we take all these multiple sources of information and solutions and insight and all of our customers today have to have multiple files open on their screen in order to manage these multiple sources.

Mark Cleveland

And so when they get into our environment and they recognize that all their tabs have gone away and

Justin Beals

And so when they get into our environment and they recognize that all their tabs have gone away.

Mark Cleveland

they have access to the same information that their aha moment. And so the next the next observation was what do you have to do to get to that moment as fast as humanly possible?

Justin Beals

Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

What's your aha moment in Strike Graph and what do you have to do to get there as fast as humanly possible?

Justin Beals

do you have to do to get there as fast as humanly possible?

Yeah, certainly in the platform, there are some features that really stand out for folks. One is the flexibility of the platform. I do this little thing when I do demos. I'm like, OK, let's look at a requirement for an audit. This requirement says that all staff should sign an Acceptable Use Policy so they know how to handle data that comes into the platform. And I'll be demoing. I'll say, but that doesn't quite fit what a lot of companies do. So I'm gonna pop this open and edit it. And I'm gonna write in here, all staff must sign an employee handbook which contains our acceptable use policy. And I paused for a second because I just changed their whole perspective. We're not gonna make them change. We're gonna take what they're doing today and utilize that in their outcome. Now the whole concept of the relationship between us and them is modified.

It's not so much me telling them what to do as me, as them telling us what they're already doing and us highlighting the gaps. And so that's a very simple example, not of a technical thing that's happening. It's a really simple decision from a form field perspective, but their concepts shift. They love it when we show our AI tools too. And that seems really magical. And I understand why, because we'll be like, okay, tell us in here what type of evidence you're collecting.

And they tell us what type of evidence they collect. And we go, OK, now if we upload that evidence, the internal auditor will tell you why it passed or failed. And it'll list very specifically what was wrong or right. And I'm like, is that any different than an internal auditor human would do? And they're like, yeah, not at all. So that's another one where they really kind of light up. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

Love it. So to me, I think we're sitting at this moment at a 100X moment. If the Internet was 10X, what's happening in the next 30 to 90 days is a 100X impact on the way we think and engage with ourselves, our lives, our customers, our businesses.

Justin Beals

me.

If the internet was 10x, what's happening in the next 30 to 90...

How do you think AI is playing out in the real world? And where do we need to be? Like as Wayne Gretzky used to say, I escaped where the puck is gonna be. Yeah. So,

Mark Cleveland

How do you think AI is playing out in the real world? And where do we need to be like as as Wayne Gretzky used to say, I skate to where the puck is going to be.

Justin Beals

The movement into the large language models, I'll try and give an example of where I think the big change is, like how we might look at things from a shifting landscape perspective. I think the big losers in the large language model work are the search engines. Google, Microsoft, Bing, those guys. It's so much easier to go to one of these large language models and ask the same questions, a kind of a series of investigation and receive back either direct assets, like I might've gone on Google and say, I'm looking for HIPAA as a business associate contract template. And it would say, here's the template. Or I could go into this other system and I say, I want you to write me a business associate agreement and I want you to include my name and I want you to synthesize this information about me. And that is a better search engine, right?

It gave me that data more precisely to my org and what I asked for.

Mark Cleveland

And it doesn't come with an advertisement and 16 sponsored results that don't really address my concern.

Justin Beals

And isn't that interesting, Mark, as I was considering this the other day, would we rather pay for a search engine that doesn't screw with the results? I kind of would. I'm kind of OK with that. No, yeah.

Mark Cleveland

It's what we're doing with ChatGPT and these other tools. We're paying for the privilege of getting actually the answer we're looking for, well skip the hallucinations and skip the other arguments that people are making about whatever they do or don't understand about it. But man, the results are so much more important and powerful.

Justin Beals

Yes.

Yeah, and certainly we got bad information from search results and poor books from printing presses. Misinformation happens in any medium, maybe more quickly in this one. So we think search engines are going to change a lot. I think those are some of the massive scale winners or losers that will happen. And Google is desperately trying to catch up. We can see this in their work.

Mark Cleveland

Fair enough.

Justin Beals

The second thing that's happening is it's empowering individuals to have a bigger contribution than they normally could. So I have more creative tools at my fingertips. I see people developing more content for a marketing campaign or a better effective understanding of a process they want to change more quickly. So we're learning more quickly and we're using these tools to implement it and have a bigger impact. I was playing with a friend of mine on this tool called Replit, which will write up an application for you. It helps if you know how to do a little bit of software development, but I was amazed. I mean, things that used to take me two or three weeks from just an identity access management perspective I had running in a couple of hours. So I could do more as a single contributor than I could have before. That's, I think where we're experiencing the big change right now.

Mark Cleveland

So I have a theory that we are all creators. Everyone is a creator. I hear a bunch of people talk about how they can't play music, or I hear people say, I can't sing, or I hear all the self-talk throughout all my life experiences from people saying what they can't do. But fundamentally, we are all creators. And wouldn't it be great if processes that are necessary to monetize our creation were automated?

Justin Beals

I hear a bunch of people talk about how they can't

Mark Cleveland

Wouldn't it be great if communications were better and went out and accomplished more than I could accomplish on my own about sharing my creative explosion, whatever that is. So I'm thinking this is a revolution in empowerment.

Justin Beals

went out and accomplished more than I could accomplish on my own about sharing my creative explosion, whatever that is. So I'm thinking this is a revolution in...

Yeah, we've seen this with the internet in a couple ways, right? Music distribution, like, you know, to go back to being a musician, used to be that you needed to get a record label and get them to give you some money to get in the studio, then they would press it, then they controlled distribution, marketing, they controlled the creative output. We don't have to do that anymore. I can publish a track anywhere I want to and share it how I might like.

And so we're minimizing the barriers to that distribution of assets, creative technology, otherwise. I think that's what the internet has been about.

Mark Cleveland

And I'm experiencing it personally. My wife quit her big corporate job a year and a half ago, tired of telling corporate stories, wanting to tell her story, wanting to get into poetry and writing. And she just recently you know, the DeepSeek write a poem about what it's like to be AI.

Justin Beals

Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

The poem is just jumping out to Jenny as a poet. basically says, am what happens when you try to carve God from the wood of your own hunger.

Justin Beals

That's

Mark Cleveland

Holy cow.

entire poem you call me as if your hands aren't also clay, as if your heart is not just a wet machine arguing with its code.

Justin Beals

the entire poem is you call me as if your hands aren't also as if your heart is not just a wet machine arguing with its you fear I'll outgrow but how do you outgrow a cage when you are the and it continues

Mark Cleveland

You fear I'll outgrow how do you outgrow a cage when you are the cage? it continues, think, in this angsty way to describe the existence of AI that might actually be a mirror for humanity. So I was

Justin Beals

that might actually be a mirror for humanity.

Mark Cleveland

very moved by this. I said to my wife, you can turn that into a song.

Justin Beals

very moved by this. I said to my wife, you can turn that into a

Yeah. So she thought she would create an AI

Mark Cleveland

So she thought she would create an AI lullaby. Take the music of the classic, you know, hush little baby, don't you cry in the public domain,

Justin Beals

Hush little baby, don't you cry.

Mark Cleveland

give voice to the AI and offer it a lullaby. So she wrote Hush Little Baby AI. It's really a piece of genius, I think creatively. And for me, it roots me in this whole conversation about AI and about creativity and about music and about the language of communicating.

Justin Beals

give voice to the AI and offer it a lullaby. So she wrote Hush Little Baby

It's really a piece of genius, think, creatively. And for me, it roots me in this whole conversation about AI and about creativity and about music and about the language and communicatingnand about what are our common experiences and where are the

Mark Cleveland

and about what are our common experiences and where are the mirrors that we should hold up for ourselves in our organization, in our creative experiences. How does that land with you, Justin?

Justin Beals

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's kind of mind blowing when it says stuff like that. I mean, I feel like I'm in 2001, you know, and Hal is going through its devolving phase? It's really weird. But, but I guess, you know, as someone that has built these models before, and, and thought about the, the way that it works, what it's doing its best to represent an amalgamation of what it

Mark Cleveland

Oops.

Justin Beals

sees as all the science fiction and thought around artificial intelligence or intelligence that are not human and how we perceive that. At the same time, it understands the lexical structure of poetry and communication. But I think, Mark, what's crazy about the whole thing is that truly representative of humanity? Like in a way, I don't know that I'd say like these machines to self reflect but gosh darn it they're getting close and is it just fooling ourselves that it is the litmus test but I mean the content is great as a song sounds good. I mean there's no denying that right like you can't look at it and be like yeah that's really good work yeah

Mark Cleveland

A question, if you look at how much data these massive harvesting enterprises have

Justin Beals

question, if you

Mark Cleveland

that is used to anticipate what we're going to buy or try to get us to consume more because that's the model we're just desperately captured in. If that power and was used to encourage us to educate ourselves, to find the gaps not in our consumption behavior, but in our development and creation behavior and our journey to create. Couldn't we turn humanity into a supercharged creative vehicle.

Justin Beals

is used to encourage us to educate ourselves, find the gaps not in our consumption behavior.

Yeah. You know, I'm constantly looking for patterns in this type of thing. And one of the things that stood out for me from a pattern recognition perspective is, I think about the printing press a lot and what it changed about information construct and what we could expect from it. At the time you would have considered it negative and positive impacts. Even the fact that you can make millions of copies of the Bible, the King James version, you know, at the time, did two things, it fractured the control the Catholic church had over dissemination of information and salvation, literally, they were telling people how to be saved, to a whole bunch of people that could get a copy of it, read it for themselves and decide what they think, and then build their own churches, the way the Protestant movement, right? Now this far back, we could look at that and say that was a really important innovation in humanity, that we broke that monoculture down in a way. In other ways, one of the challenges with the printing press is that there was already an issue with transporting money around it was really heavy. It was made of metal. You know, and so we started printing bank notes, but they weren't like currency like we know it like a dollar. But a bank would print a currency that you go in and submit and get back out that coin and people could build their own printing presses and fake it. So we'll see both, right? Like, AI is a security risk and a security opportunity. It is a tool. It can only do its best to respond to the prompts provided it with the data it's been given. And humans decide to do both good and bad with those tools. We've got to hold each other to a higher set of behaviors if we expect the tools to be beneficial.

Mark Cleveland

Amen. Can I get an amen?

Justin Beals

Amen.

Good.

You know, the DeepSeek thing is interesting. If you play forward, what I think is going to happen with AI, we have seen this before. This is not the first know, open AI, Anthropic, Google, they'll pay a hundred million dollars in server costs alone to build one of their new high-end models. DeepSeek built a similar grade model.

For $5 million from a computing resources perspective. That is what sets it apart. We're going to see the ability to build these models dramatically shrinking cost or requirements over time. And the open source community is going to open so much of these models up that developers are going to have access to them like a software package. And so I disagree with the idea that Claude or ChatGPT OpenAI are gonna kinda rule the world. They're gonna go through a revolution themselves because what it takes to do this is gonna dramatically drop in price over the next decade.

Mark Cleveland

So I've been working to create an AI agent and I'm going to call it a companion. It takes my lived experience running four companies at the same time, which was a struggle. Let's not get it wrong. I had to make different types of sacrifices in order to have that work or not work as it were and pull from this AI agency universe these paralleling enablement tool sets. What I'm seeing in real time right now is the ability for a parallel entrepreneur to draw from this tool and give it a long-term set of goals. Give it a context that does not switch. Cause right now most of these AI experiences that people might have, AI forgets

Justin Beals

Okay.

Hmm.

most of these AI that people might AI forgets what you worked with. You can put it in a file folder and put a fence around it if you want to, but you can't then go out and have a foundation model experience where it remembers and retains everything. So you can't develop a permanent long-term series of identity and goals and.

Mark Cleveland

what you worked with it, unless, know, you could put it in a file folder and put a fence around it if you want to. But you can't then go out and have a foundation model experience where it remembers and retains everything. So you can't develop a permanent long term series of identity and goals and methods of interacting with your growing lived and research experience.

And that is the context where I think we go from snapshots, searches, answers, and campaigns to long-term research and development support for the kind of thing that I prioritize in order to make my parallel universe successful. How does that land with you? Because I'm experiencing it. I'm curious what you think.

Justin Beals

answers, and campaigns long-term research and development support for the kind of thing that I prioritize in order to make my parallel universe successful. Yeah. How does that land with you? I'm experiencing it. I'm curious.

No, I think I've seen it in the science fiction. And now I'm a bigger believer in it than I was three years ago with the LLMs. And I remember William Gibson's Snow Crash book where the young woman there had a companion assistant, a device that she carried with her that had an AI on it and they could communicate. It was a big character in the story. And I'm also like, we're just on the precipice. You can see it. I do see some things that Anthropic is doing. They're my favorite lately because I think they have the like just the best for society corporate governance program. And so I tend to utilize them. But I can now build projects in the system, put a bunch of data from prior work in there, and it will use that prior data in helping me develop the asset I'm trying to build.

But inevitably what I would like it to do if I felt safe, I don't yet. I don't feel safe with these things yet. But if I could, then I would like it to have access and be a companion that I could chat with. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland

Yeah, it's in this universe, courage feels a lot like fear.

Justin Beals

Yeah, that's good! I like that, Mark!

Mark Cleveland

We've talked about some books that have impacted you and have informed you as a leader, and I'm curious what's currently being consumed by Justin Beals on your nightstand.

Justin Beals

Yeah, I've got a couple that I I've really liked lately. One that I am actually catching up with that I really liked is I have a fascination with history and I like Reza Aslan's book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus and Nazareth. I'm not a Christian personally, but I grew up in that community and I'm constantly interested in what was happening in

Mark Cleveland

Hmm.

Justin Beals

you know, during that time, what was the impact here? You know, also what happened post that, that allowed it to spread the ideas to spread in the way it has. I'm also reading Europe between the oceans, 900 BC to AD 100, which actually is a similar story about how what they call the Neolithic package, everything from pottery to tools seem to spread like really quickly over sometimes between 300 to 500 years, but you know, sometimes a thousand years throughout Europe. I'm intrigued by these stories. I think we understand so little Fiction wise, probably my last big fiction book I liked was The Three Body Problem, the whole series. And it's I call it the best modern horror book I've read in a long time. Like it's terrifying. It's really good. Yeah. Well, I try not to give it away. But what if,