Dan Streetman joins Dr. Jessica Kriegel to dive deep into leadership, service, and resilience. From his military background to leading one of the top cybersecurity firms, Dan shares his approach to leadership, emphasizing integrity, teamwork, and the importance of a service mindset. He reveals how personal challenges, like guiding visually impaired athletes through marathons and Ironman races, have shaped his philosophy on perseverance and leadership. Tune in to learn how he’s creating a culture of trust and collaboration while navigating the fast-evolving world of cybersecurity.
What Is Your Why: Dan shares how his purpose is driven by helping others be their best, inspired by values instilled by his parents and reinforced by his time at West Point.
Leadership and Integrity: Dr. Jessica Kriegel highlights Dan’s impressive credentials, from West Point to Ironman races, and his commitment to a service-first leadership approach.
Origins of Leadership: Dan discusses his formative experiences in the military, emphasizing the importance of leading by example and developing others.
Trust and Teamwork: Dan explains how Tanium fosters a culture where integrity and teamwork are central, and why creating a sense of shared consciousness among leadership teams is crucial.
Strategies for Organizational Alignment: Dan talks about maintaining alignment within a 2,000-person company through clear communication, weekly leadership meetings, and fostering a shared mission.
Navigating Challenges: Dan shares how he guided Tanium through crises like the CrowdStrike incident and explains how real-time data and Tanium’s unique architecture set them apart in the cybersecurity space.
Military Leadership Lessons: Dan reflects on how military leadership principles apply in business, including the importance of leading from the middle and setting the right example for others.
Future of Cybersecurity: Dan and Jessica explore the future of cybersecurity and Tanium’s mission to provide the “power of certainty” to some of the world’s most security-conscious organizations.
Personal Reflections and Resilience: Dan shares personal stories about his experiences running marathons and Ironman races with visually impaired athletes and how these challenges mirror his approach to leadership in business.
Dan Streetman is the CEO of Tanium, a leader in endpoint management and security, with a mission to provide organizations the power of certainty in a digital world. With a military background and extensive experience leading large organizations, Dan brings a unique perspective to leadership, culture, and strategy.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danstreetman
Tanium Website: tanium.com
Jessica Kriegel:
Website: https://www.jessicakriegel.com/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicakriegel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jess_kriegel/
Culture Partners:
Website: https://culturepartners.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/culturepartners/
TRANSCRIPT
Jessica Krigel: Dan, thank you so much for joining me. I can’t wait to hear what is your why.
Dan Streetman: Hey, thanks very much, Jessica. I appreciate it. A great chance to join you and the Culture Partners team. I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast, and having listened to it, I understood this would be a question, and I still haven’t thought about it yet. But if I were to answer pretty simply, it’s, look, for me, it’s about being the best person I can be and helping others to do the same.
I feel very fortunate in my life to have a wonderful upbringing from two wonderful parents, great developmental experiences beginning at the United States Military Academy, but to my teachers, my coaches, and those that resonated most with me are people that upheld values that were relatable to me, and their values were always about helping others be their best. Obviously, I’m action-oriented. I love to see teams strive and excel and do better than they did before. But in the end, that comes back to modeling behaviors for them and then helping them find their own why, and that’s exciting to me.
Jessica Krigel: Can I be honest? When I was researching you and your business and understanding who I would be interviewing today, you almost feel like a caricature to me because you’re a West Point grad, Army Ranger, Harvard Business School, now you’re the CEO of a cybersecurity company, and you do Ironmans, and you help visually impaired people run marathons and an Ironman once. I mean, that, to me, and I think to maybe many listeners, feels like, wait, are those people real? Do they really exist? And then your why is to be the best I can be and help everyone else be the best they can be. How does that happen? How do you come to be?
Dan Streetman: Well, to be clear, Dr. Krigel, I’m not a doctor, so I think there’s still things to be able to achieve. And you’ve done some pretty amazing things yourself, and I think everybody stands out in certain ways. Yeah, I probably acknowledge there’s a few stereotypes you could think about someone like me, and I get that, and I understand it. I also want to always be careful to believe that the model that worked for me and the model I followed is the model that everybody else should follow, or else it’s not appropriate, and that’s not true at all. So I, first and foremost, really come back to being blessed. I had two wonderful parents. They both started out as English teachers. My dad ended up running a small business and was involved in the community to become a county commissioner. Always had public service in mind.
My mom was actively involved in all aspects of school. I think she did every volunteer role in our church except be the pastor. And so that modeled for me what it meant to be involved in more than just your own self-interest. And it’s not that we were comfortable. We absolutely were very solidly middle class, but at the same time, they took time to do those things for others, and that just followed. Many of it, however, is somewhat accidentally lucky. We went to New York. We drove up in my mom’s station wagon to go on my sophomore year of high school spring break to see plays, and we happened to take a side trip to United States Military Academy. It was a warm spring day, and I’ve shared this before. It was a Friday afternoon, and the entire corps of Cadets was out running. It felt like it. Anyway, all these fit men and women, and it wasn’t like in the movies running in formation; they were just all out running. I’m like, what an awesome place. And I loved school, and I loved leadership in school, but I really loved being on the wrestling team and the football team and those pieces of athletics. This is the place for me. And I never went back and visited. I decided I was going to apply to the military academy, and I did, and I was fortunate to get in, and everything took off after that.
But the one thing I learned is to do your due diligence. It was the first warm day of the year in April. Their physical fitness test was two weeks away, and essentially, they were all out running on Friday afternoon, the only free time they had, and they were cramming for their physical fitness test. And in many ways, that’s my life. Like, look, I get it. I’m going to go investigate this. It’s hard. I’ll go sign up for it. And everything follows from that. You made the point. Ironmans were the same for me. I did spend a year in the middle of my civilian career deployed back to a combat zone in Iraq, and coming back from that and coming back into my civilian role was a little challenging for me. It was very hard for me to realize that I had friends and people that I’d known before still in harm’s way, and I was essentially back worrying about mowing my lawn and those things. So Ironmans became a way for me to take on a challenge and be distracted. I had no idea what I was getting into. I barely rode a road bike. I was a big mountain bike fan.
Again, once I immersed myself into the discipline that it takes, but also the math and the science and the getting to know yourself and digging deep, then I became hooked. And now I think I’m 12 full Ironmans in, and many more than that I have, and many of them I’ve run with your great leader Joe Terry. So I was blessed that I chose to go take that path, and it’s worked great for me. And that’s, in the end, what I would share with others is all the best career and life planning somewhat takes place in the rear view mirror. You should have a plan, you should know what you think you want to do five years out and ten years out. But as a really great leader from my military background, General Eisenhower once said, plans are useless, but the planning is the essential part. And so thinking about what you want to be and who you want to be and how you want to show up for your community or your team members is really what started it. And I think that’s been the guiding principle for me all along.
Jessica Krigel: I got to pause this right now and write that down. Plans are useless, but the planning is essential. Is that the quote?
Dan Streetman: That’s right.
Jessica Krigel: All plans are useless, but planning is essential.
Dan Streetman: Yeah. This was General Eisenhower, who went on to become a president. Now there’s the other more coarse versions of this. General Patton said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy or the first bullet. Tyson said, no plan survives getting punched in the face. But at the same time, Mike Tyson was great at understanding his opponents and having a strategy, and you do that by thinking through planning, being thoughtful about what happens if something else happens. But to be locked into that plan is the worst mistake a leader can make because there’s new information all the time, particularly if you are leading from within your team and getting that feedback, you have this opportunity all the time to adjust and get better. And that’s the important thing for me.
Jessica Krigel: Some of my favorite consulting work is the 25-year projection scenario planning with executive teams, where you pause all of the day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter, year-over-year work, and just take a second and think about what is the future going to look like 20 years from now at a macro level, and then what does that mean for the strategy of our business? I’ve done that a couple of times, most recently with a bunch of deans of different universities. That was fascinating. They basically said Education is going to disappear, so we really need to figure this out that everyone’s going to be educated by Google University in the future, which so much is uncertain, which maybe I’m finding a way to connect to the next question I want to ask you about Tanium, why and the power of certainty. I want to dig into that because that, talking about signing up for doing hard things, that’s a pretty interesting promise that you’re making right now at this time in particular.
Dan Streetman: Well look, so first, I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to be part of the team here at Tanium. We have really exceptional technical founders who built a phenomenal product. I was first exposed to it as a customer, and that made me understand the power of certainty that was achieved by our organization because what Tanium does is bring together teams and breaks down the silos. Typically, operations and security teams kind of operate off different tools and different frameworks. When we talk about power of certainty, we deliver the only true real-time converged endpoint management and security offering. So we work with some of the world’s most security-conscious and innovative organizations and help them have that power of certainty, the confidence if you will, to know that first and foremost, they’re lowering the likelihood that something bad happens to them. And then if it does, they’re able to respond quickly and inside the decision cycle of bad actors if that’s what it takes. We work with all branches of the US armed services, so it’s very near and dear to my heart. We work with MODs and DODs around the world, nine of the top 10 commercial banks here in North America. So we take our mission very seriously, providing that power of certainty.
Jessica Krigel: Which is the 10th bank that’s not working with you?
Dan Streetman: Name them? I wouldn’t want to give bad actors the edge because that bank’s important. We’re working with them. Yes.
Jessica Krigel: That’s so funny. We got to call them right now.
Dan Streetman: Yes, we should. I am hoping they’re listening to this podcast. But in the end, this phenomenal technology is only made better when our team works together and works really well together. And I feel very honored to get the chance to come in and join the team and accelerate what we’re doing to help us get closer to what our customers are doing. Throughout my career, I’ve had the honor of working with a lot of really incredible organizations alongside amazing teammates, and that taught me that characteristic that a successful organization has an important and enduring mission. To your point, providing organizations the power of certainty, particularly as it pertains to their operations and their security, that’s a 25-year vision. We’re always going to do that. We might do it differently. The technology will evolve and the people involved will evolve, but it stays focused. And of course, then underlying that, you want to have the values that support that. And again, those can go on for 25 years, and for us, they’re pretty simple. We do the right thing, we win as a team, and we are unstoppable.
And that comes back to we have this important role in organizations. So we will always strive to do the right thing and hold ourselves to that standard. And look, there’s plenty of people that do the right thing, and they’re solo performers; awesome for them. We also believe, and I believe coming from service in the military in particular, that no single person can ever achieve what an organization can achieve. If the organization’s aligned and rowing in the same direction, four people in a boat rowing in different cadence, they’re going to go nowhere. If they can row together, they’re always going to go faster than a single shell. And that’s phenomenal to think about. So those are the things that bring us together and really drive me. So I feel very lucky to have the chance to be here at Tanium at this very important time, and we’re innovating faster than we ever have, and it’s really fun to work with our customers day in and day out.
Jessica Krigel: So maybe we can learn from you then. How many employees do you have right now?
Dan Streetman: 2000.
Jessica Krigel: Okay. So you’ve got 2000. I think 2000 hits the point where people struggle with alignment really in earnest with organizational growth, right, is I would argue one of the number one most challenging dynamics that our customers come to us with is misalignment. Internally at scale, executive teams can stay aligned, although they’re shockingly not aligned very often. And yet when you start to get to that size, it’s really complicated. How do you get people aligned at an organization of that size? What’s the secret sauce that you have employed?
Dan Streetman: Well, so I want to be clear, there are lots of different ways, and I’ve been fortunate to work in different organizations from working with Tom Siebel at Siebel Systems to Mark Benioff at Salesforce, now having the chance to model the behaviors that I gathered from them that were helpful as a CEO. And the first piece is having, again, what is your shared vision and mission? Will you interact with one another with integrity, and will you interact with each other in the spirit of teamwork? That comes back to our values. So I love the fact that these Tanium values existed, but they aligned perfectly with how I view the world. As I mentioned, when I left the military after my second iteration and really began to understand how intense eight years of service, nine years of service was for this generation that started essentially after 9/11, I wanted to be very active in helping them transition.
And many of them want to come work in IT because it is exciting. And I tell them the most important I and T you’re going to bring to the equation is integrity and teamwork. And if your leaders model that, their leaders will model that. And that’s the first step: having those values. Then there’s the operational things you want to do. My leadership team comes together at least once a week. We have a set program we follow and how we share, and oftentimes it’s not always the most efficient use of each person’s time to hear what the other person is doing. But what we do is we create shared consciousness, and that shared consciousness enables our decisions to not exist in a vacuum and go off in silos. General Stanley McChrystal wrote a great book, “Team of Teams,” and I was fortunate to be able to work with him.
During that time I was deployed in Iraq, and I think this idea that creating, of course, first and foremost, the trust, that’s the integrity piece. Creating a spirit where people can work with one another is next. Then that next level is all right, now that we’ve committed to do that, how do we maintain that shared consciousness? So I do it with my leaders, I expect them to do it with theirs. And then we also hold very, very programmatic meetings with both our next-level leaders. So there is a leadership cohort that comes together where we explain changes ahead of time before we tell it to the rest of our team members. And then we communicate, of course, regularly with our team members. When there’s breaking news, I’m the person that needs to share that news, and I participate in every quarterly town hall we have. And that communication piece is key.
The final piece is the language we use, and I should have gone and corrected myself when you first asked. You asked how many employees we have, and I refer to everyone that works with us at Tanium as a team member. And that’s a mindset that then carries over to how we respect and work with one another. And so it’s one of those things that we carry through, and we’re careful with our language because language has a lot of meaning and carries different connotations. And I think that’s important in a way to reinforce to people what your values are.
Jessica Krigel: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the language that we use creates an experience which is going to drive beliefs in your organization. I remember once I was working with a large organization, I was at a technology company, and the CEO was talking about millennials that they were hiring at the time, and they said, we’re hiring lots of kids these days. And I can tell you that one word all of a sudden created so much animosity within the group of kids that he was hiring who are all adults that were really excited, but then suddenly felt infantilized. And that experience creates a belief instantly, I don’t belong here. They don’t get me. They think that I am naive or whatever that experience is. It can just so quickly turn into something that is counterproductive.
Dan Streetman: It’s such a wonderful point you raised, and that’s actually one where I was once in a meeting with an executive team, and they were briefing around our inside sales organization and how we were changing their plans, and their leader, with all the best intent, said, I can’t ask these kids to do X, Y, or Z. He didn’t believe in the plan. I was driving, it was around driving with partners, and I stopped the meeting right on a dime, and I said, I want to be clear, there are no kids who work in our organization. They’re team members who are doing their job. And that leader, guess what? Didn’t stay, shocking of his own volition, but he got it right. He recognized, alright, the culture that I’m comfortable with, and I’m not saying that some cultures don’t work, but any culture where you use something that could be diminutive to others, I think just is not the culture I want to be a part of and certainly not one. I’m going to nourish my pet peeve, which my team is very aware of, and there’s a lot. But again, it comes back to the language piece. Likewise, everyone that I know that works in a go-to-market organization generally has a title. For us, they’re directors of strategic accounts, they’re working in strategic accounts, they’re account executives. The folks that I worked with at Salesforce, district managers was a language we’ve heard before. The one word we don’t use is reps.
Now, absolutely someone can be a representative of something, but no one puts rep on their LinkedIn title or their business card. They have a title, and we’re going to use those titles. And again, it’s not that I don’t understand and we, at the shorthand, and no one means disrespect, but oftentimes it comes back where someone in finance, oh, the reps are never going to understand this plan. They’re just too, and thinking about how we expect the best of one another is part of that language for me.
Jessica Krigel: We were talking about Joe Terry earlier, our CEO. So his pet peeve language he does not like is saying, fingers crossed, going back to the value of planning. He’s like, fingers crossed is not a strategy. We’re not just going to fingers crossed on this. So funny. Okay, so can we talk about CrowdStrike? I’m so curious. What lessons or conversations emerged for you and your team when that happened as you were watching it go down? I mean, did anything shift for you internally? Were you watching it closely or were you just kind of focused on what you were doing at the time?
Dan Streetman: So we were very focused on what was happening. And I know from your podcast that your travel was interrupted and you ended up on a midnight flight out of San Francisco with a drive down to DC to meet with Johnny. And so you stuck with it.
Jessica Krigel: Wow, you really did listen to my podcast. Yes, that did happen to me. CrowdStrike was very personally annoying.
Dan Streetman: You were CrowdStruck. I appreciate that. Look, so first and foremost, we’re very close to our customers. So very early in the morning when it first started being apparent in Europe, we were aware, and we were engaged with our customers. Tanium was in no way impacted. Our systems are much more secure and solid from that aspect of it. But I was at the airport as well that afternoon. I was actually flying out of SFO about 12 hours after you, I think.
Jessica Krigel: Did you get CrowdStruck?
Dan Streetman: I did not get CrowdStruck. And it was interesting because by the time I first got there, everyone was talking about the Microsoft outage, and then as it cascaded through, we stopped at Starbucks on the way, and that barista wouldn’t be expecting to, sorry, we couldn’t take your order online, Microsoft outage. And of course my spouse is wonderful. She was very clear to say this was not Microsoft because they’re great partners of Tanium. This was CrowdStrike, and I want to be not dismissive. Look, it’s a great organization, they work very hard, but they made some significant mistakes that had real impacts. Two aspects of it: architecture, which we’ve all dug into, is inherently risky. We do not participate and leverage that architecture. But if you’re going to do that, you have to absolutely act with the utmost caution and care, and that’s where it fell down. What’s the lesson for our customers?
First and foremost, any single provider platform, if that’s all you rely on, is dangerous. And I think that what we have been very clear to talk about with our customers is we’re not telling you to have 40 different point solutions that do X, Y, or Z. That’s a recipe for silos. But we do believe you should have a few very important reference platforms. If CrowdStrike is one, great. We work with a lot of customers who are moving to Microsoft Defender, given the different approach they take. But even then, you want a real-time platform that helps you see what’s happening across all of your endpoints and gives you availability to those. That’s where Tanium, in likewise, the change management side of this to be able to see what’s up and what’s out. If you were using ServiceNow, which is another great partner of ours at Tanium, your CMDB is only as good as the data inside it.
So we provide real-time data into the change management database, ServiceNow, and it’s a tremendous workflow engine, and some of those actions can be taken out of Tanium. So we were first and foremost, they’re locked arms with our customers, helping them roll out their keys, for example, leveraging one of our modules, Tanium and Force. And then we took a lot of good observations for our best practices and reinforced them. We obviously dug deep into our own processes to make sure this isn’t something that readily happens to us. And guess what? In every meeting I have, I’m asked usually by the CIO or the CISO, how do we know you’re not going to CrowdStrike us? Fortunately, they’ve got well-trained team members who can explain how Tanium approaches this differently and gives them that control and also gives them insights on both the operational impacts of a change as well as the security impacts. That’s fundamentally a difference for Tanium. First and foremost, it’s real-time. Secondly, it can tell you everything that’s happening on your endpoints, your computers, and your servers. And then third, when you need to take action quickly, it can help you do that. So we learned a lot. I think the industry learned a lot, and we’re still very close with our customers. We had a few who were impacted significantly and worked with them to make sure that they got up and running quickly.
Jessica Krigel: So can I ask you the IPO question?
Dan Streetman: This is like a town hall meeting.
Jessica Krigel: Yeah. I mean, why not? We’re curious about things.
Dan Streetman: So look, I’ve answered this very clearly that first and foremost our focus is on our customers.
Jessica Krigel: So I saw that that’s how you answered this question before. Is that the party line? I mean, I don’t want to say is that the party line? Let me ask that differently.
Dan Streetman: No, it’s my line. It’s absolutely how I feel about it.
Jessica Krigel: Your line, that’s not going to change if you do an IPO, right? So I mean, why can’t you do both?
Dan Streetman: So you can. You’re a hundred percent correct, but I think that doing well by your customers and continuing to focus on that creates the IPO. An IPO exists to allow investors to participate—more investors to participate in your success. And so driving towards that is absolutely something we think about, and there’s lots of good reasons to be public, but it’s not our first and foremost driver. My founders, my board, as well as all of our team, know that if we put our customers first and we control our destiny, when it makes sense for organizations to IPO, that’s very well the path we do. You get additional publicity. Every quarter, you’re in the news—sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, but it’s hard, and you want to make sure your team and your organization is ready for that. And I’m not going to sacrifice our focus on product, our focus on our customers for those steps first. We’re going to IPO when the time is right.
Jessica Krigel: Okay, fair. So would you?
Dan Streetman: And I appreciate the chance to elaborate on that.
Jessica Krigel: Thank you for elaborating. I hope you’re not feeling too challenged by my questions.
Dan Streetman: No, all good.
Jessica Krigel: But one of the things that I have been paying a lot of attention to, or I think that CEOs these days talk in sound bites, and they have these scrubbed communications that they share in the media, in town halls, and investor calls, whatever. And it just feels like it stops being actual messaging because it’s just so pre-prepared. And it’s almost like a liability thing that they’re doing. They’re trying to avoid liability by saying the wrong thing. But then the result, I think, is that employees see like, oh, there’s nothing new here. We’re not really getting the story, and the mystery remains. And the reality is people are talking behind closed doors, they’re gossiping, they’re going on Blind and Glassdoor, and they’re reading on Forbes, like, what’s going on here really? And how are we going? I mean, I’m curious about your experience with that. I mean, you probably have a lot of people in your ear about say this, don’t say that. And then you have what’s in your heart of what you want to say and what you can say and what you can’t say. Does communication feel more complicated than it used to as a CEO?
Dan Streetman: Well, I think communication is more complicated for everyone in the world. So, I mean, I wouldn’t want to be a middle schooler today, knowing the trouble that I got into as a middle schooler, knowing that that can be videoed and shared and those aspects of it when your mind’s still forming. So not to equate CEOs to middle schoolers, but I think it’s hard for every person in the world, and it’s different and it gets more and more intense when everything is more available. There are 24-hour news and the chance to misspeak or make a mistake. And I watch even our public leaders make those mistakes. And so I agree that everyone wants sincerity and they want to hear the unvarnished truth. But I don’t think there’s, for me, a difference between me saying that and it actually being true. We are laser-focused on developing cool technology that makes our customers operate better and more securely. And if I do that right, then we have the chance to IPO. Too often I think organizations get too focused on that financial outcome or what that means. And maybe that phrase is shorthand for saying we’re not going to change who we are. Again, we have a lot of really important customers, DODs, and MODs around the world who depend on us. And I’m not going to lose sight of that in order to think about what our financial structure looks like a year and a half from now, two years from now.
Jessica Krigel: So that intrigues me because capitalism as a system is all about financial incentive, and people within the system are all about financial incentive. And I think that drives bad behavior oftentimes and poor decision-making. And it does almost drive the opposite of the leadership style that you talk about, which is service-oriented. So you have to consciously combat the system, the systemic incentive structures in order to show up in the way that I believe wins, and it sounds like you believe wins, but it’s not easy, and it’s certainly not easy if you’ve been burned before and you have some kind of negative experience that informs how quickly you jump to fear when times get tough, for example. So how do you continue to stay committed to this service mindset focused on customers when there’s probably a lot of pressure to make decisions opposite of the ones that you’re making?
Dan Streetman: So first and foremost, yes, there’s inherently in capitalism, there’s the trade-off between, particularly in public markets with imperfect information, short-term gain, and long-term gain. And too often we’ve seen organizations fall flat because they got too focused on the short-term gain to the detriment of the long-term strategy. Fortunately, I was trained as a strategist. I mean, that was literally what my major was at West Point. And so thinking strategically over the long run is something that comes naturally to me. And that incentive system works as long as people understand the logic. So to your question, yeah, I’ve got lots of early investors who are very curious about when we will go public, and I have the chance to speak to them very clearly about we have the chance to create a strong foundation. We’ll be larger than others. You want to wait for all the external conditions to be correct.
If you talk to any banker, they’ll tell you they think that’s, of course, the answer was always going to be, it’s going to be soon. But those are the things you want to talk about. And as long as you’re clear on why your strategy is what it is, you’re not dismissing the question, it’s a lot easier to get there. And to your point, there’s lots of competing in capitalism, which is the awesome part about it, this idea that we get to the best ideas because we compete for them. And I don’t want this idea of teamwork to mean that we’re not all trying to find the best idea, but we want to think about what our combined goal is in order to get there.
Jessica Krigel: How do you hire talent? I mean, how do you find your team or how do you make decisions around who joins your team?
Dan Streetman: Well, I’ll come back to this idea that the first and foremost pieces for me are, do they align with our values? Will they be able to always do the right thing when no one’s looking? Will they work as a team? There’s lots of successful people that are not team players, and that’s cool. I got that model. It’s not the model that we operate under, particularly if our whole focus is on helping organizations make smarter decisions around their security and their operation structure. We have to be working as a team that way. So those are kind of fundamental characteristics we look for first and foremost. And then obviously you want to have a level of experience. You want to bring relevant experience, but you also want to have an engine and an interest. So finding that sweet spot, again, between integrity and teamwork and then experience and raw will are the fun things for me.
So we source from a lot of different directions. I do believe that one of the things technology has awoken to in the last few years is our ability to find talent in all places. So continue to do outreach with organizations that help us reach. For example, there’s a great organization called BreakLine, and I give a shout-out to that team. They’re phenomenal. Started off helping veterans transition, and I met with the founder when she was still a dean at Stanford to convince her to found this. Well, now they’ve gone on to develop BreakLine Mavens, so they’re helping women move into technology that might have not been explored before, and BreakLine Apex under hired and underrepresented minorities. I love this idea of what I learned to help military folks transition and go through programs like Break Line is now something we hire from and are bringing in all kinds of talent that might not have been exposed to what we do five or six years ago. And I really value that a chance to bring in talent who’s got skills, but more importantly have the will and the values that we want to align to.
Jessica Krigel: I mean, we’re kind of verging into DEI territory in terms of this conversation. Have you been following this DEI news you had Johnny talk about?
Dan Streetman: Yeah, Johnny talked about, and I think Johnny was really sorry. So we were connecting everybody. Listen to that one. The CEO of SHRM, formerly A-C-H-R-O himself, talking about how they moved from the acronyms, DEI to diversity and inclusion. And that’s really where I’ve rested all along, which is it comes back to we’re going to get the best talent if we think more broadly, and we’re going to keep the best talent if we approach them as individuals and help them be their best person. We don’t have employee resource groups or communities like that. Instead, we use our data to ensure we’re treating everybody fairly based on not diverting based on what we know or how they align or did they go to the same schools or places of us. And I think that’s important to have that underlying piece, but we don’t think day in and day out about any acronyms. We think about hiring great people and treating them well. And if you do that, everything else follows.
Jessica Krigel: I kind of love that. We should make that a quote on a blog post somewhere. We don’t think day in and day out about any acronyms. That’s fabulous. Okay. Can you tell us about the single pane of glass?
Dan Streetman: Sure. So again, the unique aspect of Tanium, and we have both patents and trade secrets around our ability to get real-time information from every endpoint in your environment. And when you’re able to do that, the first thing you know is where everything is. I’ll use the simplest analogy, which is I’m trying to secure my house. Maybe I don’t live in the best neighborhood. If I don’t know where all my windows and doors are, how do I lock them? So the first thing is knowing what’s everything that’s in your environment. Many of the companies that first deploy Tanium find as many as 20% of endpoints, computers, or servers that they didn’t know existed and connect intermittently into their environment. So having that visibility is critically important, and we’re unique in our ability to provide that, and that’s proven in some of the great use cases that our customers have shared at tanium.com.
Now, once you do that, you want to manage it. You want to make sure that you’re addressing vulnerabilities, whether that’s software vulnerabilities or access or passwords, or you want to make sure that the software running on it is appropriate. So our ability, for example, to see your computer is licensed for X product, but you don’t use X product, but as a company, I’m paying for, well, let’s get it off. Let’s take those costs out. So those are the fundamental things from a single pane of glass, where the organizations that typically would be looking at different things, operations and security and compliance, can all see that in one pane of glass, and then can use that real-time information to update other platforms that they’re used to using. Now, the final piece for us is when, unfortunately, things do get through, and we’re seeing more and more what we call endpoint detection systems or endpoint protection systems are compromised, the ability in real time to go find that and to go take the action or remediate whether you’re going to disconnect it from the network, you can do a full clean reboot.
All those capabilities are inherent in Tanium. And that’s the key piece for us. We come back to, we give you visibility, we give you control, and then we give you the ability to respond. You could call it remediate, you could call it incident response, but in the end, it’s that confidence, that power of certainty that as an organization, you’re doing everything to be protected. And then you’re also doing everything to remediate when you need to. Now, if you take that to the final level, we also are able to see how team members, the analysts will call this employee the digital employee experience. We’re seeing how employees and team members interact with their equipment and help them remediate when they need to or help them roll out software. That’s kind of the very top of it, where that digital employee experience is also a key part of this equation, and we provide that for organizations.
Jessica Krigel: Do you think that the digital employee experience is a significant driver of culture?
Dan Streetman: I think absolutely. Look, everything that a team member does in their organization is a driver of culture. The type of snacks you have in the office is a driver of culture. So obviously your equipment and how you interact with it and your ability to take responsibility is a driver of culture. And more and more the way we interact is digital and driven by our digital assets. So ensuring that they’re performant, ensuring that they’re secure, and ensuring that the data we need to protect is protected, is all part of managing that. And so that’s why CHROs and COOs care about this just as much as CIOs and Chief Information Security Officers did before.
Jessica Krigel: Yeah, so I’m going back a second. There were 150 CEOs, potential CEOs interviewed for your job. Is that right?
Dan Streetman: So yes, you caught this in a discussion, and it was more than 150. We actually know the exact number. Here’s how this occurred. I met with the founders. I thought their technology was amazing. I loved what they did, my own CIO, independent of my input. It nominated us to deploy it because we were doing mergers and going through an acquisition. It was important for us to be able to have that power of certainty. But I was busy. I was leading this organization through its own transition, and so they continued to interview folks. They were well run, it’s a great organization, and great leaders, and Orion Hindawi, now our chair, was doing a great job as CEO, but he knew that to go to the next level and to continue to move faster, he thought he might find someone that took a different approach and that could help the organization. So went on and continued interviewing. I think the exact number, and he had it pulled from his calendar, was 162 interviews.
Jessica Krigel: Oh my goodness.
Dan Streetman: Whether they were all serious candidates, I don’t know, but I was somewhere in the first 30 and he had recalled that. And when we went through and completed the merger, they called me again, and I said, timing’s better now, I’m more interested. And we had a chance to meet with everyone on the board multiple times. Ben Horowitz was a fantastic board member, was a great coach to me through the process. And in the end, I come back to really three important things. Is this an important mission? Again, we provide the power of certainty, the most security-conscious organizations in the world, check is it technology that accomplishes that mission. We’ve got patents. We have linear chain technology, which is unmatched by anybody else. So check, and oh, by the way, not a single merger acquisition to get to the scale we’re at, which is phenomenal to think about what the founding team built.
And then third, are there people that I can learn from and that I’ll enjoy working with? Check. I’m honestly, Jessica, having probably as much fun as I ever had, certainly in the civilian world. I loved serving in the military. I loved being a platoon leader. I loved being a company commander. And in some cases, it’s very similar. You come into an existing unit, there’s team members, and your job is to help an already high-performing unit, which I had the fortune enough to join, get even better and had practice with that. The downside in the military is after your two-year command is up, you pass the guide on, and the next organization comes in, and the next leader takes over. Here, I’ve helped organizations get better. They’ve reached solid outcomes for investors and team members. This is a place where I really want to lean in and be for a long time. I love everything we’re doing at Tanium. I really appreciate that. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and our founders, David and Orion, and the people I get to work with day in and day out are just phenomenal. So it’s really a highlight for me.
Jessica Krigel: So that’s why you chose to say yes. Why did they pick you? What’s the thing that you had that the 161 other people didn’t have? Did they tell you?
Dan Streetman: I think it comes back to I align with the values that they hold dear. I like to believe, and look, we all are flawed people, but I like to believe I approach every situation thinking first and foremost, what would I do if no one was looking, excuse me. What if everyone was looking when no one’s looking? Do you do that right thing? And look, that’s our first value. I’ve proven that I can help teams continue to improve, and I love being a great team member. So again, we do the right thing. We win as a team, and the final value we have is we are unstoppable. And that’s because so many important organizations depend on us. And I think I’ve proven that both personally and otherwise, I love work, but I also love taking on other challenges. Triathlons and marathons are part of that. I had a visually impaired friend who was a Marine who lost his vision and asked me to run a marathon with him.
And then I got introduced into the visually impaired marathoner community. I’ve had a chance to do Boston three times, every time with a visually impaired athlete. And yes, the penultimate was running an Iron Man with a visually impaired athlete, and I was the last minute fill-in. I’d never swam as a guide. I’d never ridden this person’s tandem bike. I think I’d never ridden a tandem bike. And I had three weeks to prepare, and then we went off and did it. And so yes, I think to some degree I like to consider myself unstoppable, and I help organizations be unstoppable together.
Jessica Krigel: Wow, that’s a story. I knew that you had done the visually impaired guiding for the Iron Man and that it was incredibly challenging. I did not know that you were a last-minute fill-in and had never swam before that.
Dan Streetman: Let’s just say you weren’t the first choice, right? My athlete was a faster swimmer, and that creates challenges in and of itself because he was like, come on, Dan, keep up, dude. He and the bike, he’s also a lot taller. So the bike was not fit for me. So it was a long, long day.
Jessica Krigel: My favorite, one of the funniest conversations I ever had with Joe Terry was when we were talking about doing hard things, and he does Iron Man triathlons as well. And he said, just so you know, I don’t like to bike, I don’t like to run, and I don’t like to swim. Cool. Makes perfect sense to me that you’re doing these Ironmans regularly. I just think that’s hysterical.
Dan Streetman: Has Joe told you about, and this is a quick one, has told you about the accident that I had when we were racing?
Jessica Krigel: No, I don’t know.
Dan Streetman: So I typically, Joe swims faster than me. I typically catch him on the bike, and I go by him pretty fast on the bike. He doesn’t like the bike, but he’s a fast runner. And then my whole goal was just to stay out in front of him on the run. And I’ve been successful sometimes. Well, I finally got out in front of him about 40 miles into a half Ironman, so it’s only 56 miles. And I hit a rut, and I slid a long time, and I was covered in blood, and Joe stopped and was telling people to call an ambulance, and I was very straight-faced with him. I’m okay, go get on your effing bike and finish the race. He takes off, and he’s pretty emotional because I did wreck pretty hard and I’m covered in blood, but I decided to finish the race, and my wife is waiting for me. She hasn’t seen any of this. And she sees me come in covered in blood, and she’s like, oh goodness. And then Joe’s back out of the transition now. So he is running, and he said, Terry, Terry, Dan crashed. Dan crashed. And she said, I know he is right behind you. And he did look over his shoulder freak out. And so unfortunately, she broke my, I thought I would’ve had a chance of catching him, but I didn’t catch him on that race. But we did get a finish.
Jessica Krigel: Oh man. Well, he just did one where his bike fell apart in the middle of it, and then he had to bike with one leg the whole time and then just did a gratitude exercise to get to the end. I mean, the stories are incredible, but we’re supposed to wrap it up. But I have one question. I think I’ve always wondered that maybe you can answer. There’s always in business and motivational speakers and the self-help books about leadership, there’s always talk about what the military best practices are and how they apply in civilian life in business. You have all these Navy SEALs who talk about the way that we do it, and you’ve seen that commencement address about “Make Your Bed.” That’s my boyfriend’s whole thing. He’s like, I make my morning because of that commencement speech. My question is how is it different, and what makes it special in the military?
Dan Streetman: Sure. Well, I’ll come back and again, so Alan McRaven’s speech is great. Anybody that hasn’t read or watched “Make Your Bed” is fantastic. And I won’t give away the ending to it.
Jessica Krigel: I’ll give it away. It’s about making your bed.
Dan Streetman: Basically, if you make your bed, it starts you off on a path to success by doing the right thing. The first thing in the morning, it’s great, and things are going to go better for you because you’ve started with that discipline. But if things do go crappy and they don’t go the way you plan, at least you come back to a nicely made bed. That’s his moral, which I think is great. I think that first and foremost, it comes back with people who have stepped up to do something bigger than themselves.
By default, you’re not going to be paid well. By default, you’re going to put yourself at risk. You’re signing up to do hard things that don’t result in any material benefit and are hard for your family, which was the biggest challenge I had with continuing to stay in. And if you can remember that piece and not get caught up in some of the other stuff, including some of the, Hey, look at me. Things you talk about with some of the people you mentioned tell stories that I think you really, really develop as a leader. And Mark McLaughlin’s a great example. I follow what he does. And that example, I think that’s something that makes a difference. And I’m always clear to say it doesn’t mean that only military leaders are good leaders. Joe Terry is a phenomenal example of a person who puts others first, sets a great example, and helps everybody be their best.
But that’s kind of the job description as a leader in the military, and I think that’s why it carries forward. But there’s one thing that I’ve shared before, and I think it’s important that this is part of it. When you arrive at West Point everywhere, there’s these signs that say, “Lead from the Front.” And the whole idea is to take an 18, 19-year-old young woman or man and have them feel good about being in front and leading and basically driving, making quick decisions. And I had basically a great tactical officer, a guy named Cold Steel, Pete Champagne, who explained to me that you’re only getting part of this right. You’re not bringing others along with you. And I realized that early on in my life, that lead from the front was only part of the story. It doesn’t make for a great sign, but I think it set the example from the front, but lead from the middle.
A great leader will always work harder than their team members. They’ll always do their best to take on the hard challenges and they’ll eat last using a proverb of right what happens. But to think that the leader’s always going to have the best idea every time, I think, is false. And if you lead from the middle, gaining the best insights from your team around you, then you’re really a difference. You set the example from the front, but you lead from the middle. And so if you don’t get that as a leader, then you can be flawed. You’re a command and control. I’m going to drive things. And that works in certain elements. And there’s some good, great, successful, very public CEOs that lead that way, but I think it relies a lot more on luck and getting it exactly right. And sometimes they do. I think the best leaders are ones who recognize luck’s not always going to be on their side, and they figure out how to set that example from the front and lead from the middle.
Jessica Krigel: I think great leadership can oftentimes look pretty boring. You mediocre leadership looks very dramatic and sexy, exciting, right? But great leadership.
Dan Streetman: That is a bumper sticker right there. Great leadership is boring leadership, and sometimes it is. You can inspire people by giving them the confidence that they can get things done. And that doesn’t mean you’re out front waving a saber or flag.
Jessica Krigel: Totally. Okay. It’s felt like we got to really get to know you, the man behind the credentials that are wildly impressive and probably a little bit intimidating for some people, but you’re not intimidating at all. And thank you for sharing the stories and your insights, and I’m just so grateful for the time that we got to have together. So thank you, Dan.
Dan Streetman: Thank you for the chance to share it. I love what you’re doing. I think it’s important to give leaders of organizations of all sizes a chance to be reflective of how they’re driving culture and the importance that culture delivers and energizes strategy. Again, it does eat strategy for lunch, to quote, sweating. I think it’s important, and I’m really glad to get a chance to share with you guys today. So thanks very much, Jessica.
Jessica Krigel: What a great way to end it. Thanks, Dan.
Dan Streetman: Cheers. Bye now.
