[0:20] Tell us about your history.

I am a Senior IT Manager in a digital license plate startup, and we are the only ones in that space. We’ve been around for 12 years, and the reason it’s been so long is that it has to do with the government and legislation, which varies from state to state.

[02:25] How did you go from a large organization to a small startup? What are the differences?

I started at Verifone as tech support and worked in the largest warehouse. Over the years, it became a company of 6,000 people with developed MDM solutions. When I started working at Reviver, it was a huge culture shock. There was no control and I had to bring structure but there were a lot of pushbacks. No standardization. The CEO was from my previous company, so I had his support, but it took some time. The first thing I did was create SOPs for onboarding.

[07:15] How many people were you working with in the beginning?

It started at 35, increased to 85, then finances meant we had to cut back. But now, we are back at around 85 again.

[09:00] How did you learn to sell to the employees?

Our platform is in AWS, and we had one guy very adept at that. We learned to cut costs from the end-user side of things and utilized audits to optimize workflow. In IT leadership there are about 188 different things you need to be doing at once.

[13:25] How much experience in server security did you have at your previous company versus now?

There was a compliance team at the previous company, so I did learn about compliance there. Problems with unreported licenses were common until we created a service catalog.

[15:40] None of that structure was in place when you moved to Reviver, correct?

That’s right. It was a case of going manually to fix it. Luckily, companies like Adobe don’t go after smaller companies due to the payout. At the time, a lot of developers were in Russia, and they would go to Russia without me having any access. Now we are in the Sacramento area, and that’s different. I decided with Reviver, I needed a simple tool to set up. We used Congee and built a relationship with Apple support. We created standards for machine use and type.

[22:55] How are you protecting IP and what challenges did you run into?

Everything was in a cloud service, so you could control access. We use Confluence and GitHub, and there’s control over where data is saved. Cloud services have measures built in, and once you know the templates, it’s easy to set up. When people initially started spinning things up to the cloud, they set it up like it was on-prem. Building it that way it isn’t as efficient. Now, you can get the maximum out of the hardware. You can create easier backups and recovery, and you don’t have to worry about patching when you’re serverless.

[30:00] Have you done anything with multi-cloud environments in regards to redundancy between them?

We keep things separate, but we are building and expanding to other regions in AWS. So, as we grow, we can prevent service loss in outages.

[38:30] How do you get those with a startup mentality to buy into the concept of security and compliance?

The best way is to have them be part of the audit. Then they understand the implications.

[41:15] How do you assuage the fears surrounding what Reviver does?

The most common question I get is “can I just change the numbers as I’m driving around?” No, you can’t. You can modify your banner, which is pre-approved by the DMV. We do regular testing to ensure they can’t be tampered with. If you try, it will go into detach mode. Once it comes off the car, it is no longer a government ID. Once a plate has a number, it has to be locked by the DMV. The interesting thing about Reviver is how many technologies we touch and deal with. I try to stay vanilla when implementing new things because developers aren’t cheap. When it’s time to upgrade, then we look at options. The cloud allows you to change vendors easily.

[55:25] What differences have you experienced in management between the company sizes?

Our current CEO was in IT before, so that is extremely helpful. Executives don’t have time for much, so you need to get to the bottom line right away.