Valerie Zargarpur on Aligning Security and Engineering to Accelerate Growth

Overview:

In this episode, Kerry Guard and Valerie Zargarpur, Head of Marketing at Hopper Security, explore the powerful impact of aligning security and engineering. Valerie shares her approach to communicating complex security solutions clearly, discusses why Hopper prioritized organic growth over traditional demand generation, and highlights how tight technical collaboration led to a 90% reduction in alert fatigue. With extensive experience across consumer and cybersecurity brands, Valerie offers practical guidance for marketing leaders seeking to strengthen the role of security in product, engineering, and brand initiatives.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:01

Kerry, hello. I'm Kerry Guard, and welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Have you missed me? I've missed you all. I am here. We have a wonderful lineup in the next four weeks and counting, and I'm so excited to be back in the seat. What a guest we have kicking us off for Q4. I know that Q4 technically starts in October, but let's get real, folks, September, technically the beginning. So let's buckle up and hop on in. Valerie has led launches across her career, but Hopper's emergence from stealth this year felt different. She's helping redefine how we talk about security, cutting through noise, aligning engineering with security, and showing that security can actually be a business enabler. In our conversation, Valerie will share what it takes to position bold ideas in a crowded market, how to translate complex research into clear storytelling, and why humility and transparency are the heart of Hopper's brand. So grab your tea and let's jump on in, Valerie. Welcome to the show.

Valerie Zargarpur 1:05

Thanks for having me, super excited to be here.

Kerry Guard 1:09

I'm curious what's the hardest thing about leading within the stealth phase.

Valerie Zargarpur 1:17

Oh man. So within the stealth phase, you're trying to kind of walk a tight line between still building some brand awareness, building up a little bit of momentum on the back end before you announce, but also not kind of giving it away, right? You don't want to announce too much before you come out of stealth, because you take a little bit of air out of the sales when you when you announce ahead of time,

Kerry Guard 1:44

That sounds like a delicate balancing act.

Valerie Zargarpur 1:46

It is a little bit delicate. I mean, with us at Hopper, what we were focused on is a lot of channel sales as well as a lot of prospecting conversations. Still, the CEO Roy he actually started those conversations more than a year ago. So we have paying customers for more than a year at this point, which is great, because those, those paying customers, also kind of helped us with in terms of being design partners. They really helped shape certain features within the product to be both what they're looking for on an enterprise-grade level, and then also making sure it's like, it's very usable, and it's actually solving problems. And so we spent a long time, and I say we I was, I've only been here since February, but the team that I work with, all of our engineers, they spent a very long time researching a ton before they ever went to market, before they ever started building anything, they researched. You know, what other tools were missing, and so making sure that we stood out when we came into market with capabilities that actually meet market needs. Kind of fill those gaps in the market where this like legacy tool set, software composition, analysis, it's been around for like, 20 years, but it hasn't evolved much in 20 years, and so really making sure that we're sort of filling a gap there.

Kerry Guard 3:12

Yeah, that's really helpful to actually do the hard work of the research, to lay the foundation before you start marketing, folks, oh my gosh. What a concept. Anyway, I'll be off my high horse. Now you've said this launch felt different from the many you've done before. What made Hopper's emergence from stealth such a unique, sure milestone, specifically for you?

Valerie Zargarpur 3:37

Yeah. So what's interesting is I have done a ton of launches. My career is, actually was primarily in the B to C space, and so I did a lot of launches and events and things like that that were kind of taking a B to C brand that I would work with, and kind of announcing a new product line, announcing new capabilities, or really, just like, you know, like with HBO, they would do, they would do certain events around, like movies and things like that, right? And so in my cyber career, everything has been around product launches. So it's, they're just, it's a scaled back in a very different way. And so my next step was always I wanted to go step back from a Series C, which is where I was at before with Jupiter one. I wanted to step back into a seed or earlier-stage startup. I wanted to do a launch from stealth that was always kind of like the next tick on the career box. And so this was really interesting, because I got to be the person that pulled every string, essentially. And as the sole marketer, you wear every hat, essentially. And so it was very, very interesting in terms of, I knew everything that needed to go into it, but actually physically executing on every single. Piece. It's a ton of work.

Kerry Guard 5:04

So, yes, that's held up in the air and, like, not drop at the same time. I mean, no longer, like, I just had a great conversation with somebody about this last night, where advertising used to be, you know, you buy TV ads, and that's and you had a share of market, and you knew that if you spent 10% over the share market, then you have whatever uptick and like that was just the math, and now it is so far from that simple. And as a sole marketer trying to activate all those channels to get that messaging out into the world, oh my gosh, you do not have an easy job by any stretch.

Valerie Zargarpur 5:37

So it's also interesting, because we have decided to not go the traditional demand gen route. So we're not doing like, we're not doing ads, we're not doing out of home stuff. It's really just organic content and sort of content syndication through that, those organic channels; that's one of the other reasons why it's felt very different, like I have not built out traditional campaigns as you would see them in the last like five to 10 years. You know what I've really spent the last 10 years doing in the market? I haven't built out ads. I haven't built out, you know, ad copy and search copy and things like that. It's really more about optimizing everything that we're doing for maximum visibility, we're using founder-led social media, which is great. Our founder has a network of 30,000, which is amazing, wow. And so we're trying to kind of lean on that. We also have some very wonderful like hard-working engineers, everyone on our engineering team, our design team, they all have like, insane experience. And so bringing in their capabilities, using them for for content creation, has been, you know, really, really key. And it's, it's resonated in terms of, like, we've seen a lot of organic growth. It's been really great. You know, we may decide to kind of phase up and start doing more in terms of traditional demand gen, or kind of, like today's demand gen, but it's, it's definitely been working the organic route. You don't have to spend a ton of money to kind of launch a brand, so.

Kerry Guard 7:25

Yeah, you just have to stay in the pocket and be consistent. And as I've been saying, feed the machine of Yes, not just publishing content, but it's being engaged within the LinkedIn community as well, which, when you have something founder-led and somebody who can do that and speak to it. Oh man, that is the dream you're living, the dream ever there.

Valerie Zargarpur 7:42

Valerie, I mean, I have to hold them all accountable. It can be a challenge because we are a startup. We're a small startup. And so we have we, you know, we have a customer roadmap, things that are on the dock, and so we have to make sure that we deliver those. We have things that we're building for prospects. And, you know, we are primarily an engineering company, like we've got 18 employees, of which only three of us are go-to-market. So it's a lot of engineers. The primary focus is really just making sure we're building what our customers and prospects are looking for.

Kerry Guard 8:25

Amazing Hopper entered the cybersecurity space that's already noisy with vendors, very noisy. How did you approach carving out a distinct narrative that would actually cut through? You started talking about this a little bit in terms of legacy. So, yes, tell us more about that.

Valerie Zargarpur 8:42

Yeah, absolutely. So we do sit in a very noisy space, like I said, SCA software, composition analysis, it's been around for like 20 years at this point. There are some very established vendors, but they haven't really evolved much in the last 20 years. And so reachability is a relatively new concept, I say relatively new, probably the last five to seven years, maybe five years or so. But it's not that many companies do reach ability, and they don't do it at the level that we do it at, right? So there are a lot of flavors of reachability, as we like to call it. So there's like package-level reachability, which is sort of like it reduces some of the noise, but it's not reducing all of the noise. And then there is function-level reachability, which is what we do. And so what that does is it reduces the noise of vulnerability alerts. So if you're you know in the cyber space, essentially your prime, one of your primary jobs is really just triaging vulnerability alerts. And if you can reduce that noise by 93% like that's already a huge head start, right? But one of the things that we really did to differentiate, and this is where I give so. Much credit to our engineering team, because they're amazing. We built a function-level reachability engine that essentially is able to interact with all of these really dynamic features within, within the web, within like the frameworks that they're building in, so Spring, which is like a Java framework that most enterprises run on, Django, Flask, ASP.NET, fast API. These are all new things to me. I was not knapsack previously, but it's um it's one of those big differentiators for us, is that we can handle all of the dynamic functions that they're able to do within these frameworks. And so things like reflection, things like shading, repackaging, naming, we're able to see because we sort of, we build your software just like you would, so we actually go through and we can see what's actually reachable, what's actually exploitable, and then we're able to reduce that noise even more. And so while we say 93% if you get down to like what's exploitable, what's actually seen, or, you know, shaded within like Java vulnerabilities and things like that, we can actually reduce the noise quite significantly. But we can also show you where they might be, showing you false negatives, where they might say, Hey, you don't have this vulnerability. But in fact, you do have it because it's shaded. And shading is essentially they like rename packages within the code. So that's getting like very technical, but those are really our core differentiators. Are really getting down into the technical way in which we do function level, reachability. It's just completely different than anyone else in the market.

Kerry Guard 11:54

I understood that. I've been in cyber for, I don't know, eight plus years, having worked with brands from ExtraHop to Qualis to a whole bunch others. Um, but when you're in the space and we talk about the importance of messaging and clarity and balancing the technical side with the approachable side, how are you how are you doing that through your messaging? Or are you just talking to a really technical audience? Technical audience, and it doesn't matter?

Valerie Zargarpur 12:23

No, so that's a great question. We are. We're trying to make it as approachable as possible, because when it comes down to it, yes, our differentiators are highly technical, and so when I first joined the company, I spent a week in our office in Tel Aviv, and I actually sat down with our engineers and was like, Okay, I need you to explain these really technical concepts that I have never been exposed to explain them to me, like, I'm your mom or your grandma. Like, how would you explain them? This concept to them? And it's so funny, we came up with this, this analogy, not we didn't come up with it because this analogy exists in the world. But essentially, there's like a meme video where this woman is, she has a shape sorter, and she's like dropping shapes in the shape sorter, and every single wooden block shape fits in one hole. It's supposed to go in different holes, right? Like, the triangle is supposed to go in the triangle and the circle is supposed to go in the circle, and the square is supposed to go in the square. And instead, it's like, she's just dropping everything. She's like, now the circle goes in the square hole, and you can just see her breaking down as it's happening, right? And so that's at its core level. That's one of our differentiators. Like we do what's called points to analysis, PTA, other function level reachability vendors do Cha, which is class, hierarchical, hierarchical analysis. Sorry, that's a hard word for me to say out loud. And so, essentially, yeah, so essentially, we put the shapes in the right holes, and they put the shapes in the circle hole, right or the square hole. And so because they tell you everything that could fit, right, versus tell you what's actually fitting, what's actually being executed, what's actually reachable, what's actually what's actually exploitable, right? And so based on that, like, you know, even against vendors that are direct competitors, we have a we have a pretty significant competitive advantage. And we do, we challenge any prospect to, like, come to us, try us out, like, quite literally, like, test us for a day or two against another tool. It's like a five-minute deployment. So it's not a hard thing to set up. That's huge, yeah. And so we're like, just test us, and if it, if we don't reduce the noise against your other competitors, like, we're going to tell you, we'll tell you, like, hey, they're a better fit for you, right? But yeah, we've never lost a bake-off in that way.

Kerry Guard 14:58

So I hope. Of it. Oh, yes, a bake off. It's so cool. You can even have a bake off, because so many times I found my podcast a few months ago, who was talking about how it's good to have a free trial and a demo request. Because normally what will happen is they'll go download the trial to see that it's an actually working product, not that they can actually use it yet, because to get it into their tech stack is moving mountains. And then once they can see it's an actually working product, then they will request a demo. And so for you, you actually have a working tria,l like amazing.

Valerie Zargarpur 15:37

Our deployment is five minutes. It's literally like, you click, you put, there's a, like a GitHub token, right? You put a token in, and then, essentially, that token connects to your repository in like less than five minutes, and then you have, we auto-discover, and it's continuous. And so literally, like, we discover everything we have actually discovered, like internal libraries that people didn't realize they had still or you know, abandoned projects and things like that. So it's actually really helpful, because they, you know, just cleaning up the noise is also not just the noise, but like the infrastructure noise of just like excess stuff out there.

Kerry Guard 16:16

Absolutely, that's amazing in terms of hoppers. Core promise, other than a quick test, is bringing engineering and security into alignment. Oh my gosh. I feel like they're speaking our language from a marketing and sales perspective. We feel you. We feel you, engineers and security teams, from a marketing perspective, how do you showcase that alignment in a way that resonates with both sides and is like a positive and benefit to working with you guys?

Valerie Zargarpur 16:44

Totally. Yeah. So in terms of security and engineers and alignment, we actually, we are primarily a security tool, right? And so the idea here is that we're helping, we're helping them triage so that they can pass tickets off and they can pass call graph evidence, or whatever it is, over to developers. The challenge is, like, developers don't want to do this, they don't want to fix vulnerabilities, they want to build cool stuff, right? And when your ticket backlog is like, miles long, which I've experienced in other companies, like you have this huge backlog, you're never going to get to it all, how do you properly prioritize so that you're actually getting stuff done? And so what we have is, actually, we have a call graph. And so what the call graph is is it's line by line, tells you exactly how it's reachable. And you can click on the line, and it will take you directly to your GitHub repository. It'll take you to the line of code. It tells you what you need to update. Like, version, package number, whatever it is you need, it tells you how to update it, and then you're done in minutes. We actually had, we had one customer who it used to take them days to go through and triage everything and find where it was reachable and find okay. This is how we actually need to fix it. And this is like, this is what the fix is without making a breaking change. And then we went, he went from that to he found a vulnerable Java package, and it was fixed. Like, fixed, deployed within 20 minutes, which is huge, like, and when you have an average, like, a lot of times your average ticket cost can be like we had a we just posted something the other day. It's like 500 to 4500, depending on how much triage, how much work it takes on that specific ticket. Tickets can cost an organization between $540 $500 if you're eliminating a lot of that work, think about how much you're saving, and if you're multiplying that by 1000s of developers, you're saving hundreds of 1000s, if not millions, of dollars. It's significant.

Kerry Guard 18:50

So so much easier to sell when you have real, tangible outcomes like that. So that's off to your team for figuring that out.

Valerie Zargarpur 19:01

Yeah. And then on the marketing to engineer side, which is also, I always feel, I know that my fellow, like cyber marketers, always feel this pain. I always felt this pain of, like, trying to get engineers, um, to kind of give you concepts and stuff like that. And so what I found is actually um doing, doing a ton of, like, brainstorming sessions with them and having conversations with them. And like, I'm not just on an island over here, like, we're working together and we're doing things together. And I encourage a lot of our engineers who don't normally get a chance to, like, write blogs and things like that, like, Okay, give me an outline, or give me some bullet points, and then I work with them. A lot of our engineers, though, love to write their own stuff, and so I give them the platform to basically write what they're they're working on, and we work together to make sure that what they're writing, you know, resonates with the community. But. Obviously, they're my target market. So, you know, they're what they're writing is going to resonate, so I just make sure it's not true most of the time.

Kerry Guard 20:08

So, yeah, well, SEO enablement there. All good. Yeah, all good. That's fantastic. In terms of how you like it sounds like you really embodied your values, not just across security and engineering, but really as a whole company. And that's sounds like your founder is breathing all that into you guys, and that's amazing. And hats off to them for that.

Valerie Zargarpur 20:35

That's what I was gonna say. That's a really, really big part of what drove me to join Hopper. Our we have two founders, Roy and Oron, and the two of them together, they really set a culture that is, you know, one that makes you excited to be at work every day like we, we were talking Roy and I were talking at Black Hat, and it was like, you know, some of our engineers could probably make more money. They could do, you know, they could go work for Facebook or Meta or Google or whatever, and they choose to come to us every single day. And not only do they choose to come to us, they're excited about the work that they're doing. And it's such a great culture when you have that, like, when you wake up and you're like, you're excited to work. You're not like, oh, it's Sunday, you know, like, I have to go back to work on Monday. I never feel that way. So it's it.

Kerry Guard 21:27

Culture matters. Really nice. Yeah, culture totally matters. That's absolutely wonderful. You're in terms of storytelling and research, your team uncovered, you mentioned this your your team uncovered millions of hidden Java vulnerabilities and technical finding that could easily get lost in jargon. How do you transform research like that into a compelling marketing asset? I can imagine trying to balance the whole foot of it all is totally.

Valerie Zargarpur 21:52

Yeah, and it's also just staggering, right? When you're telling someone 2.5 million, you're like, they're like, how do I even begin to process that? And so what we do is we actually, we summarize the data. I will say that, like, we utilize AI a lot. We are a small team, and so AI is, like, fantastic for data analysis. And so going through and summarizing the data, yeah, going through and summarizing the data, and, like, really knowing, okay, how can we group these vulnerabilities? How can we make this digestible? And so that's really what we did. We have the raw data of these, like, 2.5 million vulnerabilities. But I'm not going to, like, put them out there. One, because then that exposes all of those vulnerabilities, and two, and obviously makes them exploitable, but and two, it's just an overwhelming amount of information. Like, no one's going to know what to do with that information or how to process it. But we do actually have an open offer to, you know, basically any engineer who thinks they might be vulnerable, we actually say like, Hey, Sorry. I'm so sorry my dog barked. I have dogs.

Kerry Guard 23:23

Real life happening here, folks, it's all good. We know how this is remote life. This is

Valerie Zargarpur 23:27

One of my best friends is dropping off something as a thank you, and did not realize

Kerry Guard 23:35

I watched her kids over. That's the best thank you, best friend. Yay.

Valerie Zargarpur 23:40

Surprises. Yes, exactly. So, yes. Sorry. Going back to what I was saying, we have an open offer for, like, any engineer who thinks they might be have, you know, have these shaded vulnerabilities within their system. one we talk about it, and we tell you, you know, what's up, and then, like, where you can find them. But we have an open offer that if they want the CSV, like we're not going to, we need to kind of vet who you are, because obviously, releasing that kind of data puts a lot at risk. They're all open source projects, and so because they're open source projects, it is, you know, you can't go out individually to the different people who maintain those projects and have them fix these vulnerabilities. And so that makes it a little bit challenging, because one, we don't want to expose all of this, but two, we don't want to, you know, put an undue burden on open source maintainers who may not have the bandwidth to fix it. So knowing that we can kind of provide the fixes to people. We provide it to all of our customers. And, you know, really, anyone who's interested in it, we've got it as, like, an open, open source thing, like, we can, you can come out to us. We'll tell you what it is. But going back to your original question of, like, how do you turn it into a marketing asset? It's really just you. Don't again, explain to me, like, I'm five, right? So go through and explain, like, what is shading? Not everyone knows what shading is. What are jars, or like, Uber jars or fat jars? There are different versions of jars in which these packages can be hidden or shaded. And so explaining it at that level, and then saying, Okay, here's the data, and this is how you uncover it. That's really what we have found. Resonates. And the main thing is just making sure, like, I pass things off to my non-cyber friends. I'm like, read this. Can you understand it? Like, do you get the concept? And so kind of having non-cyber friends to like bounce things off of has been really helpful as well.

Kerry Guard 25:45

So helpful. Such a great idea. Yes, I love this. I love this. Sorry, my kids just got home from school. You're good. We're all having real life happening.

Valerie Zargarpur 25:59

Life happens. It's like happens.

Kerry Guard 26:01

One second.

Valerie Zargarpur 26:06

See, at least you don't have barking dogs there. There is that. Not yet, not yet. No barking dogs, right? Now.

Valerie Zargarpur 26:22

Are there any questions that I might answer that are coming from LinkedIn chat?

Elijah Drown 26:25

Trevor, he's in a at infuse, and he loves bake-offs, and is talking about having two dogs and a family, and his teenagers seem to always interrupt him when he's doing he used to do his live shows, have some fun. And of course, we're talking about in the comments that carbs is our kryptonite, so that's a problem.

Valerie Zargarpur 26:46

Yeah. So she, she quite literally her she was dismantling her father's house over the weekend because had to put him at home and all medical decline. But she quite literally brought me candy from this, like a candy factory store that's right next to it, which is so funny.

Kerry Guard 27:06

Nice candy. We have favorites. It's a whole MKG sort of. It's a whole thing that goes around. Yeah, we all have our favorites. Okay, back on track. I love that you're doing open source because the power of community, especially for developers, goes such a long way. So when you can feed and give back to them, oh man, are you winning loyalists for life. So hats off to your team and finding a way to give back so intentionally; that is fantastic.

Valerie Zargarpur 27:41

Yeah. I mean, all of our developers have been on the other side where they're the ones that have had to fix, they've had to remediate their some of them are security researchers who have had to reverse engineer zero days and things like that. So being able to give them very clear evidence, and like a direct link to the palm file or palm XML or wherever it is, they need to triage. Giving them that direct link is huge because it cuts developer remediation time significantly, and that's really what it's all about. We're just trying to give developers back time to work on the things that they actually care about. They don't care about this stuff. You know, that's why there's such stress between security and engineering, is because, like, developers don't really want to triage stuff, and so, you know, they have more interesting things to

Kerry Guard 28:32

do. Let me build, let me build exactly, Valerie, we're going to go in the way back machine. We're going to be Kind Rewind here and look at lessons from your previous jobs in earlier in your career. It was rooted in experiential campaigns for brands like Nike and Coca-Cola. What lessons from the consumer marketing have proven most valuable, and now your cybersecurity days?

Valerie Zargarpur 28:56

Totally, so I actually did a talk about this last year at the cyber marketing con, because I didn't realize that, you know, coming into this market experientially up until, like, the last two years, was really not a thing. And so it's, it's so interesting to bring that in to A, B to B. Market experiential marketing is really just about creating that emotional connection with the buyer, B to B. Marketing specifically B to B. Cyber is just like fairly dry, right? And there are a lot of companies. Wiz does a great job of this. I've seen Pantera and a couple others start to bring this in as well. I did this a lot at Jupiter one, but really coming in and telling a story and creating that emotional connection, rather than just like throwing your marketing headlines on a booth or throwing them, you know, at your customers. And so the idea is really just you want to create that emotional connection, and you create that emotion. Connection by creating unique experiences that engage more than just like one or two senses. And the idea there is that the more senses that you engage, the more memorable the experience is. And what that does is actually it makes them more likely to remember you, right? And so we did this in the very early days at Jupiter one with neon green pants. I quite literally made my entire team wear them. We all hated them because they are neon green pants, and they are not flattering on anybody. But when you're walking around a massive conference and everyone's in jeans and khakis or black slacks, neon green pants are going to really stand out. And so when you're doing follow-up and you're saying hello from your friends in the neon green pants, like they're going to remember that, right? And so pulling in those, those B to C type touches, has been really kind of game-changing for us in terms of how we market in cyber. And I love brands like Whiz who are embracing that, like their team, their pros at experiential, like, it's just amazing. And so I love seeing that, because those are, those are really B to C tactics, like influencer marketing was very much a B to C tactic. I was doing influencer marketing 15 years ago, right? But it was on the B to C side, rather than on the B to B side. And so seeing some of these tactics pulled in, because ultimately, your B to B buyer, they're a person, they create those emotional connections. Like, that's they, that's what they buy on. They buy on emotions. They buy on relationships.

Kerry Guard 31:39

So totally hungry pants. I love how it's such a simple tactic, too. It's not like this big, immersive undertaking. It's like this, really simple, just accessing the senses and becoming a little bit more memorable in the noise. Absolutely so good, so good in terms of building with humility. You've described Hopper's build process as transparent and humility-driven. How do you ensure that philosophy shows up, not only in the product, but in the brand voice as well?

Valerie Zargarpur 32:12

Like, absolutely, yeah. So we have a head of design, Liz, who is just amazing, like she has really been thoughtful about how she presents our brand voice, and she is our head of design. So she does both product and brand, and so not just when she was building out the the brand logos and the guides like, in terms of, like, what our typography is, all of those things really embrace this voice of we want to be curious, we want to be helpful, we want to be clear in the way in which we are communicating. And one of the things that I really appreciate is like our CEO, Roy, has been very, very focused on, and, you know, very intentional about building a company that has women in it, building a company that it's the company's named after Grace Hopper, who was a pioneer in computer in computer science, yeah. And so being very intentional about those things and pulling that same voice into the content that we write, the posts that we do on LinkedIn, and just making sure, like it's very clear we're not we're not trying to be too cool. We're not trying to be, you know, overly stuffy and professional. We're just trying to be helpful. And that's really the focus on both the how we portray things in the product, so like UX UI all the way into our brand.

Kerry Guard 33:47

That's amazing. That's, I can't believe that went over my head, because I am married to an engineer, and he talks about because we have a daughter. So we talk about Grace Hopper all the time, yeah, constantly reminding her that the history of how she

Valerie Zargarpur 34:04

And we actually so we have an AI, like we have an AI agent, essentially, and we named her grace for exactly that same reason. We named her after Grace has who is an inspiration for us all.

Kerry Guard 34:15

So absolutely. Ah, so good. Outside of work, you organize running events and enjoy puzzles. Do those hobbies influence the way you think about strategy, problem-solving and team alignment?

Valerie Zargarpur 34:29

Probably yes. So one cyber to me is just one big puzzle, and go to market is one big puzzle for me to solve. And I love that. I love a challenge. And so that's really why I do what I do. It's why I'm excited

Unknown Speaker 34:43

to do what I do.

Valerie Zargarpur 34:44

And then in terms of, like, you know, running events and other things, I pull in a lot of my own, my own hobbies and interests, into what I do. So I love i. I love theater. I'm not a theater person, like I don't act, but I enjoy watching it, and I enjoy kind of like the escape room puzzles and murder mystery type stuff. And so I actually did a whole event series shout-out to Sarah Heartland, a former colleague of mine, who she is a theater person. And so she helped me. She helped me, kind of like, get the improv actors together and things like that. But like, building out the storyline and creating this cybersecurity who-done-it, and having all of the elements of like the invite as a cipher, and you have to have a password to get onto the website, to even see when and where it's happening, like, all of those things are just exciting to me. I enjoy those things, and so it's fun to me to be able to build all of those things out. Absolutely.

Kerry Guard 35:50

I am in charge of all the team-building activities for our annual summit. We get together once a year, and it's just me last year, I did all the New York Times because he went to New York and we stayed by the library, and so I hiked us all over to the library, and I recreated all the New York Times puzzles. Love that for them to figure out what the theme was going to be for the for the next 36 hours.

Valerie Zargarpur 36:15

Amazing.

Kerry Guard 36:16

Yes, love it. So much fun.

Valerie Zargarpur 36:18

Yeah, I love pulling in those little, those little fun things. Because, you know, everyone does dinners, and everyone does, you know, like, I hate to say it like, even we do dinners, right? Everyone does dinners, right? It's hard to stand out when you're one of many that's inviting you to a dinner. And so when I, when I'm able to, kind of, like, plan for a larger event. Like, I like to make them a little more interesting, a little more like engaging. And I don't want to just do, like, a Top Golf for, you know, something like that. So it's just that's my own personal preference. It's what I found has resonated over the years. Like I said my, most of my career has really been in B to C, and so I know what works with people, right? And ultimately, our buyers are people. And so finding those things and kind of pulling them in from the B to C market has been, has been most successful. Amazing.

Kerry Guard 37:18

Amazing. The product launches are high-pressure. How do you manage the balance of urgency and sustainability for yourself and your team during those intense cycles?

Valerie Zargarpur 37:31

That's a good question. So we are, because we are such a small team, it's really like sometimes product launch cycles, they slip right. And so, you know, making sure we're in communication on what the light launch cycle looks like, I often like to have my engineers write around the, you know, write about the product that they're launching, because they're the ones that built it right. And so making sure we're aligned there, I I try to do something that's a little more technical, something that's a little less technical and and just kind of, you know, making sure that we're just openly communicating with each other. Because sometimes, you know, timelines slip, priorities change. And you know that's startup life.

Kerry Guard 38:25

Communication is everything.

Valerie Zargarpur 38:28

Yes. Communication is everything, absolutely.

Kerry Guard 38:32

Oh, stories I could tell. Yes. Last question for you. Valerie, well, second to last question, last real question, then I have a fun question. Okay, what do you think the next frontier is for marketing and cybersecurity? Where do you see the biggest shift coming in the next few years?

Valerie Zargarpur 38:48

That's a great question. I will tell you. It is like, if you're not currently using AI tools, then you're already behind, essentially, right? And I hate saying that, because AI is everywhere, and in cyber specifically, everyone is slapping agentic on everything, and they're slapping AI and everything, whether or not it actually makes sense to be there. So I will say, though, that it's like the shift is not going to be in being able to create content. Content Creation is much faster. Now I can tell you that, like, in a day, I can whip out like two really good long-form blocks, right? And but the onus then becomes not on the creation, but on the editing and making sure it's retaining your voice, making sure it's not telling something that's not true, right? Because sometimes a shift of a word will change the meaning, obviously. And so the shift for me that I've really seen is around like content creation. It's really going to be expedited by cyber or, I mean, not by. Cyber, but by AI within cyber, but that also just means, like the expectations are changing, you're expected to create more. As a marketer of one, I'm creating what maybe two, three years ago would have taken four to five of us to do, right? I'm doing that job of multiple people, and it allows us to stay lean for a long time, which, as a seed stage startup, you want to be a little bit lean, right? You want to be intentional. Check those margins. Yeah, you want to, you want to be intentional with how you're spending your money. And so it's, it's really, really nice to be able to, to be able to be able to do a lot of those things that I would have needed more resources for before, and to do them for very cheap, because, you know, llms are not that expensive, so they're not, yeah, so augmenting in that way, I think in cyber marketing, this is absolutely a shift. I will say it's probably a shift in every marketing sector, and specifically, like tech marketing, you know, as long as you can feed it, as long as you can feed it other content that is of your brand, voice, and is accurate, and what you want to talk about, and then kind of like giving it parameters. If you're tight with parameters, it's actually like, it's great, it's a great tool, honestly, yeah, like I said, yeah, data, so.

Kerry Guard 41:31

Yeah, I mean garbage in, garbage out, right? So if you're just having it regurgitate the internet, you're in trouble, yes, but if you're feeding it proprietary, unique content coming from the inside that then helps, and then it's helping you curate it. That's a completely different story, and it absolutely helps you move at the speed of light. It's Yes.

Valerie Zargarpur 41:56

I cannot do more. I will say, make sure you're using a closed model, because you don't want to train other people's models on your yes, no, you do not pay you pay for it.

Kerry Guard 42:05

Don't use a free version. Pay for it and find the right one. There are so many out there now, and they're all getting better. So you know, between Google's Gemini Claude and ChatGPT, I'm hearing more and more people say that chat GPT is not keeping up. So yes, have to see, yeah, what people are using, Valerie, this has been amazing. I could keep talking to you. I have a still. I have follow-up questions for days, yes, but All right, we are at the time. I do want to know, outside of work, outside of being a cybersecurity marketer, what is bringing you joy right now in this moment in time.

Valerie Zargarpur 42:43

Love that. So family. Family brings me joy. My partner and I have three kids between the two of us, and they are just the light of my life. Also, there are three dogs who like to interrupt.

Kerry Guard 42:56

So it's like six kids

Valerie Zargarpur 42:58

right there. There are a lot of them, there are a lot of dogs, there are a lot of kids, but it's great. It brings me a lot of joy.

Kerry Guard 43:05

That's amazing. That ages for the kids.

Valerie Zargarpur 43:09

So we have a 10, a nine and a half and a five-year-old for the kids.

Kerry Guard 43:15

I'll have a 210-year-old old I'm about to have a 210-year-old olds. So yeah, that's a a transitional age.

Valerie Zargarpur 43:26

It is, in fact, transitional age. You have boys though, right? Boy and a girl, boy and a girl. That's right, I was gonna say because it's a very, it's very different between boys and girls. I see this with my friends and their kids. It's a girl, girl mom versus boy mom is is a different world. You get both.

Kerry Guard 43:46

I had the joy, the joy. Oh my gosh, Valerie, I'm so grateful. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you to our listeners and for our audience. I know there's some commenting happening. I can't wait to hang on out on LinkedIn and see what's going on and join the conversation. I'm grateful for you. If you like this episode, please like, subscribe and share this episode. Was brought to you by MKG Marketing. We manage the details and you capture the market. If you enjoyed this episode, you'll love similar episodes from Carmen, Angel Harris on RSA for real talk, and Ken Marshall on how AI is shaken up B2B marketing. Thank you all so much. Thank you, next time you