Ian Paterson Podcast Transcript

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Headshot of CEO Ian Paterson

Ian Paterson

Ian Paterson Podcast Transcript Introduction

Ian Paterson joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.

Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.

Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ian L. Paterson. Ian L. Paterson is an entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in leading and commercializing technology companies focused on data analytics and machine learning. Ian has raised millions of dollars in private and public financing, completed multiple mergers and acquisitions across North America and Asia.

And is co-inventor of three patents. As CEO of Plurilock, Ian successfully built and grew Plurilock, leading to its successful listing on the TSX Venture Exchange. Previously, Paterson served as founder and CEO of data monetization platform ExaPIC, and as director of insights for Terapeak, a venture backed analytics firm.

Paterson is a regular speaker, media commentator, and active angel investor.

Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon and welcome to the show.

Ian Paterson: Thank you, Brian. It’s good to be here.

Brian Thomas: Awesome. I’m glad to have you here. I know we’re just a couple hours difference. You’re up in the beautiful province of British Columbia, Canada, been there a few times and love that place. So again, appreciate you traversing time zones to be on a podcast with me. Ian, jumping right into your first question.

What inspired you to establish Plurilock in 2016 and how did your previous experiences with Exapik and Terapeak influence your vision for the company?

Ian Paterson: Yeah, I appreciate the question. So, my background is, is actually data and analytics. Plurlock is a, is a cyber security company, but I sometimes joke that I’m a bit of a one trick pony.

I, I solve business problems using data. My background with Exapik and, and Terapeak were both using big data and analytics, which back in the, sort of the 2010 to 20, 2016 timeframe, it was still hard, hard thing to do back then, a lot easier now. And what was interesting about, uh, about Plurlock was that, uh, coming from a data background, we started the company with some technology that allows us to identify people based on their keystroke and mouse movement behavior.

So I was attracted to it from an intellectual curiosity perspective. This technology was effectively a research project at a local university and myself and a handful of investors spun it out. We created a company, although that the research had been going on for a little bit of time. And then, we started taking it to market.

And what we quickly learned through the first couple of years of market development was actually just how disorganized and fragmented and fractured the cybersecurity industry was our first two really big material customers were the U. S. Department of Defense and the U. S. D. O. D. as a specific D. O. D.

agency. And we very quickly learned that it wasn’t necessarily who has the best technology because of how fragmented the market was. And so it, it really, it educated us a lot on what it was going to take to, to ultimately to be successful by, by serving our customers. So it was a very interesting initial period where we were working with some of the most discerning and really prominent customers out there.

And it was our first step into cybersecurity.

Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And there’s been just a lot. In fact, I’ve had several guests recently over the last few months anyway, that are doing a lot of this cybersecurity stuff and they bring something unique to the market like you do. And so I do appreciate you highlighting where you started and how this came about with Pluralock.

So thank you. And Ian, it seems like every day cybersecurity is in the news all the time and you obviously see quite a bit. What do you see that the rest of us maybe don’t?

Ian Paterson: Well, I think just how prevalent it is. I mean, every business owner, every executive that I speak to always has a story about either their company getting attacked, some of their employees being scammed.

It’s just so prevalent. And if you compare it to physical crime, it’s almost like imagining that every single business that you might see going down Main Street in your town is going to get burglarized or vandalized on a regular basis. It’s almost inconceivable. I mean, to give you a very practical example, one of the most common attacks that we see is targeting new employees.

And so bad guys will Reach out to a new employee to your company that they’ll see from LinkedIn, and they’ll figure out that person’s cell phone number, they’ll text that person and say, Hey, it’s the boss. I’m in an important meeting. I need you to run out and buy some gift cards. And typically they’ll buy 100 or 500 worth of gift cards, not a huge amount.

And they’ll send those gift card numbers off to the bad guys. And at some point, the person, the employee will, will go to file an expense report or mention it to somebody. And then, and then they find out wasn’t actually the boss who was texting them. That story happens. So frequently, most people are embarrassed when it happens to them.

So they don’t necessarily want to talk about it, but it’s just a endemic in business today. And so as a result, there’s a lot of need for cybersecurity companies and vendors like ours to help educate our customers on what’s happening and, and ultimately to, to help them stay safe. Thank you for highlighting some of that.

Brian Thomas: That’s probably one of the biggest scams out there. We’ve all been hit with it, almost fallen for a couple of them, but not yet today. I’m knocking on wood, but you just always have to be very alert to these things. So I appreciate you sharing your perspective on it. And Ian, after having successfully completed multiple mergers and acquisitions, what lessons have you learned during that process?

Ian Paterson: Well, so Plurilock, we went public in 2020. We’ve had, uh, we’ve grown both organically as well as inorganically. And what that means is that we’ve both grown revenue. Um, when we went public in, in 2020, we had less than a million dollars of revenue. Our last full year was, was 2023 and we did about 70 million, 7 0 million in revenue.

So we’ve seen a lot of growth during that time. One of the things that we learned though, and part of the reason that we, we decided to go public was, That you can grow by continuing to hire salespeople and reinvesting those profits. You can also acquire growth or you can acquire additional teams, revenue, customers, et cetera.

And so we’ve made good use of both of those. And we wouldn’t be where we are today without, without that inorganic growth or without that, that M& A experience. So it’s not something that every business owner necessarily has experience with. But it’s really allowed us to grow quickly to get in front of a lot more customers a lot faster than we would otherwise have been able to.

And that was really the key part of our strategy and ultimately allows us to cross sell some of our other proprietary capabilities through those customers. And so it’s been really a key element of our strategy of the company.

Brian Thomas: Thank you. And having a lot of that experience with mergers and acquisitions, and you highlighted something that I think is really important is when you have money that you can reinvest to help quickly scale and grow the company is always a good thing.

So thank you for sharing. And Ian, last question of the evening, with advancements in AI and machine learning, how do you foresee these technologies shaping the future of cybersecurity?

Ian Paterson: Well, it’s been interesting ever since chat GPT really hit the scene, we’ve noticed, as well as others, a huge increase in the number and frequency of cyber attacks, as well as certain cyber attacks being a lot better.

So, one of the things you might realize is that spam and phishing emails have gotten really good. Like the English isn’t, isn’t broken English anymore. It’s actually, it’s, it’s quite believable. And so what that shows is that the bad guys have adopted generative AI and AI tech tools generally to accelerate.

And they’re quick to adopt these new technologies. The bad guys, funnily enough, they don’t have a compliance department that’s going to slow them down or anything like that. So we’ve definitely seen an increase in attacks overall. We’ve seen an increase in the sophistication of attacks as a result of AI and machine learning on the bad guy side.

Now, when it comes to good guys. There’s definitely a good amount of technology that is making use of first machine learning, as well as artificial intelligence, as well as generative AI, to try and cut down on some of the mundane processes or tasks that are time consuming, but they don’t necessarily add a lot of value.

And so it’s a bit of a cat and mouse game here where, you know, one side of the conflict adopts new technologies. That creates a change in the, in the scales. And then the other side of the conflict is, is also trying to adopt those new technologies. And, and, uh, it, you know, kind of seesaws back and forth to mix metaphors.

So I would expect that we’re going to continue to see change overall in the industry as a result of new technologies, ML, AI, Gen AI. I don’t think that’s going any away anytime soon. And I think rather than looking at any one specific piece of technology, really what this shows is just how important and consequential the cyber security market is, and it’s certainly the reason why, why we’re excited, why we’re in it. And ultimately for the average investor, it’s, it’s something to consider about having in your portfolio, just knowing how important this industry is.

Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I would say over the last year or better, Ian, we’ve had a lot of different guests.

We all talk about AI now, of course, but there are so many different applications and platforms that leverage a particular AI for a particular industry or, or a niche market. And it’s just amazing how much I’ve learned over this past year to interviewing guests like this. So I appreciate your perspective around AI and machine learning along with cybersecurity.

So I appreciate that. And Ian, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.

Ian Paterson: Thanks, Brian. Pleasure to chat. I think if folks are interested in checking out either myself or what we do, uh, the, the address is plurlock.com, uh, if you’re an investor and you want to check out, uh, the investment details, Plurlock.com/IR, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Ian L. Paterson.

Brian Thomas: Bye for now.

Ian Paterson Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.

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