Ep. #1230 - AI for Security and Privacy Purposes

Matt Watson  0:00

And we’re back for another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is Matt Watson, your host today. Excited to be joined by Ken Cox today from St. Louis. He’s also the host of a podcast called Clicks and Bricks, which you should check out. We’re going to be talking about, I think he said he’s started 100 companies before. So we’re going to learn more about that. And he’s got a new one coming up with about incubators and all the trials and tribulations of startups today. Before we get started, I wanted to remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by Full Scale. You need to hire a software team. We can help you build any kind of software you need. We got 300 employees in the Philippines. That’s what we do. Check out FullScale.io. Ken, welcome to the show, man. As are you, is this 101?

Ken Cox  0:44

I don’t have an actual account of it. It depends on what you want to call a company, right? Starting a website, getting a domain name, you know, getting it over the line, if that’s considered a startup man, way more than 100?

Matt Watson  0:57

I mean, it includes buying domain names. I might be in the 1000s. No,

Ken Cox  1:00

I’m in the 1000s. Actually, you know, getting LLCs and getting a client base. I mean, I’ve been involved in hundreds, if not 1000s. But myself or my family. Yeah, it’s it’s easy, 50.

Matt Watson  1:16

Well, you, so you’ve started a few things. You’ve invested a lot of things, you’ve been around this ecosystem for a long time.

Ken Cox  1:23

Correct. Yeah, I mean, I’ve been, you know, not wanting to work for other people or creating my own path since I was a kid.

Matt Watson  1:30

You’re like me. We’re just guys looking for something to do.

Ken Cox  1:35

Everybody to pay for it?

Matt Watson  1:37

Yes. If somebody else will pay for it. Or if we can make it are hobby is making money. So it’s, you know, this is a hobby.

Ken Cox  1:45

Yeah, but there’s just not making money. It’s creating cool products that, yeah, it’s easier, right? Or whatever that is, right? So sometimes you shoot and miss, and sometimes you shoot, you hit a home run?

Matt Watson  1:57

Well, so you you’re before we started recording, you were talking about you have a new company, a new thing you’re working on. So tell us a little a little more about the new thing you’re working on.

Ken Cox  2:06

Okay, so PPGs.Global, stands for privacy policy grading system, as I was selling Data System Data Services and, you know, for my main job as President of Hostirian, and my competitors are Amazon, Google, those guys, right? So those are all publicly traded companies. And I was talking about the risk of doing business with publicly traded companies. They have a legal obligation to do the most profitable thing. And if they, you, have the right to sell your data, you better believe have. They have to have to. So if you’re doing business with a privately held company, they can have different rules, you can put different things in the contract, and you can have more room. And as I continue to talk about privacy and AI was on the ramp-up, right, because we had a really huge ramp-up of AI. Tech to the main to the public. About a year and a half ago, these two things seemed to be in line with each other. I felt like I was kind of a crazy person talking about, oh, people are stealing your data, right? eBay is doing, you know, eBay is doing bad stuff with your data. And there was a legal case about not eBay as a company but employees within eBay are using the data in a bad way. So I’ve just felt like I was talking about this arbitrary thing, privacy, and I didn’t have a way to grade it, right? So, developed a rubric for grading a privacy policy. So, we wrote an entire system that goes out, downloads privacy policies, analyzes them, understands them, writes a quick review, and then grades them A through F so that even a second grader would understand. So, the risk going into sharing my data with a company.

Matt Watson  3:53

So for example, if I want to use Reddit or HubSpot, or whatever it is, I can take their privacy policy, feed it into your system, and you’re gonna tell me all that crazy shit they’re gonna do with my data.

Ken Cox  4:03

We’re gonna give you a letter grade, and a brief para, you know, a paragraph about the risks of sharing your data with that company at a nice level. So you can get the whole gamut. So but then there was the whole process of okay, we’ve done this, and it’s a great lead gen source for the data center business and doing business with privately held companies, but there’s no money in it. So

Matt Watson  4:26

Yeah, I’m thinking, how do you monetize this? That’s what I’m thinking.

Ken Cox  4:29

But whenever you start realizing you have 300,000 privacy policies in your database, and you’ve already analyzed them and graded them and companies have to do risk assessments on their vendors and vendor review, that becomes a really nice simple product that you can offer to the public, right, or to the business. If you have a stack requirement, then then you have to do this. So the vendor review process, right, using this data. We’ve automated that. If you have a SOC 2 environment you have to go and read every privacy policy, I understand it and do a risk assessment on it. Well, we’ve already done all that work for you.

Matt Watson  5:04

So, do you guys have every privacy policy from every company in the world now?

Ken Cox  5:09

Right now, we’re, we’re cranking it through, we’re at about 300,000 and we go back.

Matt Watson  5:13

That’s crazy.

Ken Cox  5:15

I’m trying to get to a million before the end of the year. So that we’ve just read that

Matt Watson  5:20

weird goal, man, not I don’t know anybody who has that goal. My goal for 2023 is a million. I want to read a million privacy policies. What the hell kind of goal is that? I’m not reading them are bots or reading? I know, I know. Those are weird goal. Nobody wants to read one of these not one and you only read a million of them?

Ken Cox  5:39

No. So we’ll do it for you. And then hand that data over we right now it’s free to the public, right? If you want to know the privacy policy grades, you can do it in our survey it is to the business.

Matt Watson  5:50

So how, so you talked about being in an incubator? So you’re gonna you’re going through an incubator as part of this?

Ken Cox  5:57

Yeah. So I’ve been accepted to the BetaBlox Program. And we’re going there in January for a week through their incubator program.

Matt Watson  6:06

It’s going to be on their TV show, too?

Ken Cox  6:09

Yes, it’s on the show. So it’s a competition incubator, which is kind of fun. That’s probably Yeah, I decided to do it. Yeah. I’m a fan of bootstrap. I like bootstrapping company. So but for this particular project, I do plan on raising money.

Matt Watson  6:24

So, what’s the name of this the TV show again?

Ken Cox  6:27

I think it’s just called The Blox.

Matt Watson  6:29

Okay. So that so for those who are listening that have not heard about this thing, and I don’t know much about it, it started in Kansas City, though my hometown, from West Bergman, and whoever else is involved in this thing. He was on MTV, the real world and whatever. And this all this, you know, TV and all his all his thing. He loves the stuff, he loves all the intention of all this. So he’s a driver of all this, but they have paid and have BetaBlox here was like his own incubator for like, a lot of years now. It’s like 10 years or something a long time. So it’s a cool incubator they have and then they did this big TV series out of it, which is cool. So you’re gonna be a TV star?

Ken Cox  7:07

Well, I don’t know if you’d be TV star, I think it definitely gets me like an E-class. Celebrity. Well, that is, it’s gonna be a ton of fun. I think I’m going to learn a lot in the process that I’ve never been through because I’ve bootstrapped or self-funded. Everything I’ve been, I’ve worked at companies in the early startup phases that raised money. So I’ve been through that. And I’ve been the hosting provider for companies that have raised money. Yeah, I’ve never done it myself. So okay, I’ve got mentors that I can lean on. But I thought with the opportunity to go to this incubator, and be this competition, and for the extra publicity, it seemed like a great way to go.

Matt Watson  7:48

So what are you? I mean, you’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. What do you hope to get out of this incubator?

Ken Cox  7:55

Well, the, you know, I like to walk slow.

Matt Watson  7:57

Shouldn’t you be teaching stuff at this incubator?

Ken Cox  8:01

Well, I’ve never raised funds. So I don’t know. You know, I’ve never I don’t know how to go from a friends and family round to an A series to an A route. I don’t know how to do that. I’ve never done just

Matt Watson  8:09

email all your rich buddies.

Ken Cox  8:13

Yeah, but I think that there’s some negotiating power. And some of those people there might be part of that A round. Okay. Right, and different ways to structure it. And right now, I think my preview has been fairly narrow in tech startups. I’ve done like most entrepreneurs, I’ve done a bakery, I’ve done a bounce house company, right? I’ve done all of those kinds of things in my 20s. But this stage, it’s a bigger business than I think long-term than I really understand. Okay, right. When you’re talking about selling data access to data at the API level, I’ve never done, right? And

Matt Watson  8:58

So you’ll see this as an API, like a data business. So you want to go partner with like other firms that do cybersecurity related software or SOC 2 audits, like all this kind of stuff. You want to partner with them? Yeah,

Ken Cox  9:10

for me right now, the sock two is like my sweet spot, right? So if you have a sock to, I can save your company hundreds of hours a year and labor. Right. Okay, can you add I can give you a report. And if I’m not saving you the labor, I think your employees are probably lying to you when they say they’ve actually done a risk assessment on all your vendors.

Matt Watson  9:31

So I feel like I’ve been SOC a few times in my life, but can you explain to everybody what SOC 2 means?

Ken Cox  9:37

I don’t know what SOC stands for. But basically, it’s an audit procedure that a third party comes in and audits all of your procedures. And vendor compliance is what they call a trust policy inside of that SOC on it so they audit you know, all the rules that you say that you knew your business do you have video surveillance do you have at at source control systems? Do you lock your computer? Do you have backups? Do you? How do you onboard vendors? How do you onboard customers so that you know that your business is consistent? It’s primarily, the reason we do a SOC is because our business has a financial impact on our customers. Right? So we want to make sure that our business is run properly. And a third party says that it’s done. If you were publicly traded, you would have a Sarbanes Oxley audit, but a SOC. Yeah. Private.

Matt Watson  10:30

So it stands for Service Organization Control type two.

Ken Cox  10:36

Right. So, in the type two is that you do it over a period of time. So they come back is just hey, they come in and they do it once? And yes, you’re following the rules. As of today, the SOC type two would be, they come in quarterly, and make sure that you’re doing it over a long period of time.

Matt Watson  10:56

But more like, doing anything with sock to just feels like getting socked. That’s really what it feels like.

Ken Cox  11:05

I it took me years of being with an auditor before I realized that if I worked with them instead of against them, my life would be a lot easier. But it always feels so intrusive when you’re in an audit.

Matt Watson  11:15

But you still hate them either way.

Ken Cox  11:17

I mean, they’re asking you really good questions about your business. And when you tell them what you do, they’re like, well prove it. Right. And that was part of the problem that I’ve always had. It’s like, Oh, do you have a vendor onboarding process? Yeah, they call me and I talked to them. And if I think the service is good, I onboard them. But did you do a risk assessment? And do you understand what they’re gonna do with your data, all of those, here’s play in to what a real risk assessment would be. And my experience with that particular vertical is, if they’re doing it, it’s costing a lot of money. But they’re probably just saying that they’re doing it. They’re not doing a good job.

Matt Watson  11:49

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Nobody does this stuff the right way.

Ken Cox  11:52

Right. So we’ve automated that process away. That’s the first product that we’ve come out with, for PPGS. There’s a lot of other prod products later, you know, right there and like an anti virus software can do an API call. And if you’re on a website that has a privacy policy, they can very quickly show you the summary of that privacy policy. Okay. Right. And we’ve already done all the heavy lifting. I don’t know who has the largest database of privacy policies in the world. But I think, I’m up there.

Matt Watson  12:24

You know, I didn’t know anybody who had that goal in life. So congratulations.

Ken Cox  12:28

We sold large databases of data for lots of money. Yeah, you know, we sold, I was part of a group that owned the largest database of GI Joe components. Okay. And we sold it, my check was pretty nice. Right? We used to own the domain name, y joe.com. And it was a community of people that went in and they sold and traded GI Joe parts, like, you know, if you got the guy, but you don’t have the gun. It’s not as it’s not as nice. So Oh, my goodness, we wrote the database to track all that stuff. And meanwhile, I throw away Legos every day. Yeah. But if you had that database, there’s companies that would pay a lot of money for it.

Matt Watson  13:09

I know. I tell people all the time. It’s like if if throwing away Legos bothers you, you just don’t have enough kids yet. I have kids, I’m over it. I’m throwing them away.

Ken Cox  13:22

Yeah, we have the big. My kids started buying at the store, we go to the store every day, I’ve got a nonverbal autistic son. And we go to the grocery store every single night of our lives. And he and he buys us dinner at the grocery store every night. But this week, he found these Lego gummies. Okay, and it’s this box of gummies that are a little Legos and they work and you can build shit with them.

Matt Watson  13:46

Nice. I needed some of those and then eat them. And then they’re gone. You don’t have to. I have these giant Legos that are from a company called Roblox. They’re 12 inches by six inches, like a really big. And our old office at Stackify we use them to build cubicle walls. And then after we went remote and COVID and sold the company all this shit. I have like 1000 of those at my house. And my kids build the craziest stuff you’ve ever seen every week in the basement. So but so that. So having an API company or a data company, there’s a lot more of those these days, there’s a lot of companies are like API companies. So when you started this, did you think that you were starting an API company?

Ken Cox  14:32

No, I didn’t. When I started, it was generally just hey, how do we take this really intrusive task and challenging task of reading and understanding a privacy policy and then communicating that to somebody in a way that they understand if because we allow a 13 year old online and basically, I think that laws are written that a 13 year old can sign a contract with the company and be legally bound to it and, and share their most intimate and giveaway their most intimate data. I think that’s wrong. And we don’t there’s no way in the world right now to educate them in a way that they understand the risks of going into that agreement. So that was originally my thought process of one, how do I stop sound like a crazy person when I talk about privacy and privacy rights, right? I had to make this more. Not suggestive. But more objective, right? How do I do that? And a rubric was the right answer. And then I just kept continuing to build from there. And then how do I give this to the world? Well, I can either go ask people for money, or I can create a product around this data that I’ve already collected.

Matt Watson  15:47

So I told you what SOC two stands for, you have to tell us what rubric stands for.

Ken Cox  15:52

I don’t know what rubric stands for, but it’s basically the grading system A through F. Okay, like so you know, when you’re in elementary school, you have the rubric of 100 to 92 is an A, not you know, and then your B and then your C? It’s just the guidelines on how you grade how you give it the letter grade A through F.

Matt Watson  16:15

Okay. Okay. And it’s not a word. It’s not a word I hear a lot.

Ken Cox  16:19

Okay. So we created that, for instance, if the privacy policy is, if they’re able to change their privacy policy without informing you any other way than just changing it on their website, that’s automatically letter grade reduction. Right? Because I don’t know how in the world, a contract could hold up, if the contract holder has the right to change the document, without telling you.

Matt Watson  16:49

Yeah, so this just happened with like Unity, the big development platform for mobile, mobile games, like they changed their terms of service. So they were going to start charging people and stuff. And they basically, like, just changed it and we’re gonna retro actively change it. And it’s, it caused, like all this huge outrage and I don’t even know what happened, but it was sort of this thing where like, they just decided to change the terms and screw everybody that retroactively like, and all sorts of shit into after that.

Ken Cox  17:16

So and that’s a real problem. I don’t know how to solve it. I also don’t know, because we’re checking every quarter, are there changed? The part of the service is we checked the privacy policy every quarter, and notify the user of PPGS user, if that changed or not? Right. So that’s just part of that service. But also, we’re just keeping that data. So I don’t know later, what lawsuits are gonna arise that I’ll just happen to have every quarters privacy policy documented in our database? Yeah, I don’t know how’s gonna be, right?

Matt Watson  17:23

Where are you? And maybe the Wayback Machine? Maybe the way maybe, right? Maybe not? Well, I do want to take a minute and remind everybody that finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit FullScale.io, where you can build a software team quickly and affordably. We have the platform to help you find great developers and manage that team actually visit full scale.io to learn more. So I’m gonna get show you how to use jet GBT for this. How did you how did you do this?

Ken Cox  18:24

So we use a software called, and I and I got it early? WTF GPT and any GTP, any GPT are the two engines that we use? Okay. For this, we are we are currently part of the raising the funds will be creating our own large language model on privacy that includes all the laws of all the states. I don’t even know right now, you know, do jurisdictions? Are there any laws in the country in a municipality level, that have privacy rights for their citizens? And I don’t know that right now. I don’t know if it exists. I know that, you know, I’ve been around the internet for a long time. So I’ve, I’ve done business with people that I didn’t know what their data was before we did business together. So I’ve been involved in a lot of court cases in my life. And I know that a law in a small municipality with an aggressive district attorney can really play havoc on a company doing business outside of that municipality.

Matt Watson  19:32

Well, we have the same issues now. Right? Where like, I helped build people websites for one of my businesses, and it’s like, oh, how do we stay compliant with California and like these different states, and sure as hell couldn’t do it down to the city county level, like how in the world would I even know?

Ken Cox  19:49

And I don’t know that right now. The other database that we’re working on is at least the 50 states privacy policy laws currently in place documenting where you can find those and read those that’s part of our education onus to the to the globe, right? We named it PPGS.Global for a reason, we want to give the we want to educate, and track and make transparent privacy policies and privacy concerns for everybody. Right? I think you know that there’s a big buzz on security in the world today. And I think security really starts with understanding your privacy, and your privacy rights.

Matt Watson  20:26

Well, and this is a good example of using large language models, which is like what Cha GPT is, and Google Bard and all these things, you if you guys can create your own large language model, that is the expert at privacy policies and all the laws like you, you’ll find all those laws, and you feed them into this large language model, right? And then you dump a million privacy policies into it. You’ve got, you know, your own large language model for privacy policies, which I’m sure will blow away, like what ChatGPT would do, because it’s not an expert at any one thing. It’s like a general purpose, you know, thing. And so you guys get to be the, you know, expert, large language model for privacy policies. And I think we’re gonna see a lot of this, we’re gonna see a lot of people that are building large language models for all these different niches, that’ll end up being very viable. There’ll be like, the expert, and whatever these different trades are, which I think is was cool.

Ken Cox  21:25

And right now, and I’ll tell you, and I’m just this is free information that I think is could make people hundreds of millions of dollars throughout their life. When I applied for the trademark and the patent for PPGS, to have an automated system, using large language models and narrow AIs, you know, that whole process to create the large language model and then keep it updated, is patentable. Okay. And, and I got, I mean, we’re patent pending right now. But you know, even the trademark we used, we were able to create a new trademark category with privacy policy audit support. Right? Now, I mean, talk about, you know, blue ocean instead of red ocean. This is an industry and some technology stuff that if you really wrap your head around and understand how AI can work and how it can help you, and not AI as a solution to everything, but it’s a toolbox, it’s a tool in your toolbox to create better, faster, easier companies. You know, there’s a lot of blue oceans in the world to be had today. So if not find your passion, and use AI to build your business around it.

Matt Watson  22:36

It’s interesting to think that you could patent basically every individual use case of a large language model.

Ken Cox  22:44

Well, I think it’s going to happen. I mean, why would you watch a product like PPGS without the ability to patent the process to do it with AI at play?

Matt Watson  22:56

Well, I built a lot of software for 20 years and never patented any of it. So I’ve never been a big

Ken Cox  23:01

fan of patents. And most of the other patents on you use user interfaces.

Matt Watson  23:08

Like are you specifically a value out of those patents? Are you glad you did them?

Ken Cox  23:14

Um, yeah, I mean, we sold the company for quite quite a bit.

Matt Watson  23:18

The patents were a big part of it?

Ken Cox  23:21

It’s a big checkbox. Okay. Right. am I buying something that’s that unique? am I buying something that is defendable? Yeah, right. defending your position is, if I don’t know how I’m going to defend my position in the business, I’m not going to take it to market.

Matt Watson  23:39

Yeah, but I mean, like, you own a hosting business. And it’s somewhat of a commodity, right, like a lot of a lot of competitors. Like, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Ken Cox  23:48

We started this, you know, I started in this company, or previous versions company in 99. We started the hosting company in 2000. Yeah, and we bought the data center. And if you couldn’t sell a website in 2000, you had big problems. Right. So my, my first big startup that I was involved in that did well, like got over a million revenue was, you know, having the knowledge, having a good product, or having a reasonably good product, and being at the right place at the right time.

Matt Watson  24:23

That’s a huge part of it. Right? There’s timing.

Ken Cox  24:26

And I’ve had some good hits from then, right? And, and I’m saying me, but we have a huge team and I wasn’t, I was one of a lot of people that put this together. We got super lucky in a couple of different cases. And I think the luck has always been at the the product market fit at the right time has been hands down the carrier for our business over the past 20 something years.

Matt Watson  24:56

Timing is always a big part of success, like my first company We built CRM software for car dealers. And we really specialize in like internet leads. And that part of it. It just at the right time that everything in automotive went to internet leads, and then a recession happened and all the car dealers stopped doing traditional media and only did internet like we were just the right place at the right time. Honestly, it was a big part of it. And I think that story happens a lot.

Ken Cox  25:24

Yeah, so in the meantime, you keep your processes in order, you keep a good solid staff, you keep trying new things, right. And you’re always trying to get that new best thing. Luckily, for me, that first big hit was a hosting, facilities based hosting, right? And the the logic there was, hey, we’re gonna have this solo business that can help us do any startup want to do. And we have a good stable foundation for these mid-market, you know, clients that need a local data center provider. And and that’s how we did it. And it’s been a very stable, there’s been some rocky moments for sure. Yeah. But you know, it’s been a very stable business for us for a very long time. And you’re right, it is absolutely a commodity right now, which it is now. Yeah, we’re supporting our existing clients, we have our sales processes of order. But there’s just not a high demand for it anymore. Like there was, you know, for the first five years in that industry.

Matt Watson  26:20

Yeah. And the thing about business is its ever changing.

Ken Cox  26:23

By so foundation for us to always hop off on new things to

Matt Watson  26:28

Yeah, yeah. And that’s kind of my you know, story with Full Scale. Like, you know, we have 300 employees, we work and do a lot of things for other people. And I enjoy you know, investing in a little things and helping sport you know, other people do other little things, probably like yourself. I don’t know if I’m going to be a TV star and beyond the Blox, but that that’ll be my next goal in life, I think, is being a TV star.

Ken Cox  26:52

Yeah, it’d be a lot of fun. So

Matt Watson  26:55

So the incubator that you’re going to join, Blox, it says down on Tulsa, you actually have to go down there, or is it a remote thing.

Ken Cox  27:03

So evidently, I’m going to live in, in a facility with at other startups, and it’s a competition. So every day is a new competition. And we have, you know, we compete for, you know, winner of the Blox that day.

Matt Watson  27:17

And this is like a survivor thing, where you’re doing like weird competition.

Ken Cox  27:23

It’s more like, competitions, like you would see on The Apprentice, right? It was like, hey, you know, you’re gonna do this thing to this, and then you’re gonna do your pitch to, you know, a Series A, or tell me what your marketing strategies are gonna be.

Matt Watson  27:38

You know, Donald Trump’s gonna fire you.

Ken Cox  27:41

Yeah, that doesn’t happen, though. Will is such a such a sweet guy. You know, like, there’s no, there’s like three winners, but there’s no particular order, right? That kind of thing. And then there’s, you know, other words like most investable, most scalable, those kinds of things. But it seems like a great way to get exposure, and get really, really comfortable doing your pitch, which is wild.

Matt Watson  28:04

Yeah. So do you have co-founders for this?

Ken Cox  28:07

I do have co-founders for this, quite a few. I’m still courting one co founder, who is and he would be my AI expert. Right now. I just went through MIT’s program for business for AI. I completed that about three weeks ago. So right now on the AI expert, but I’ve got a guy that for on the audit side, who’s currently an auditor got a really good friend of mine who works for the S&P 500. He’s He’s a founder of that. And then River City Internet Group is a founder is the is the primary investor at this point.

Matt Watson  28:45

Well, I’ve got an idea for you related to this is. So one of the biggest problems we always had at Stackify, is vendors would come to us and want us to fill out their security questionnaire. And it’d be like 100 freaking questions. And I mean, it would take hours to fill out one of these damn things. And you know, we need something that uses AI that can, like read all of those things. And then we put all the answers and like some other database, and it figures how to, like, regurgitate our previous answers to those questions,

Ken Cox  29:17

Right. So in the automation process, when you build up, please, it’s not. It’s in there.

Matt Watson  29:23

Oh, wow. So

Ken Cox  29:24

then you would have to tell your client, hey, why don’t you go to PPGs and just dive into Review Management? Yeah. For PPGs, this particular product for PPGS. Our client is the MSP and the local accounting firm. That’s who we deal with. We accept 5, 10, 100 pieces of software, and then they give it as a value add to their clients. Okay. And then, on the other side of that fence, the vendor fills out the form once with us. We store it on their PPGS ID number, and the next vendor that the next client that comes just has their default answers.

Matt Watson  30:00

Yeah, so it’s not just about privacy policies, you’re talking about all sorts of security policy stuff.

Ken Cox  30:04

Long-term. Yes. Yeah. patents on the privacy policy pieces. But software can be used for, for other things, right. So

Matt Watson  30:13

Dude, that is really cool if it could do all the security policy stuff. So to give more examples of people that are listening, like at Stackify, they would ask us, like, what is your data retention? What is your disaster recovery plan? Like? All these kinds of things? Where’s your change control for? How do you deploy software to production and like, it would be all this stuff. It’ll literally be like, 150 of them, you’d have to go through and each one might be a couple paragraphs, and you know, some of the shit we did really good. Some of it, we would just sort of make up like, oh, yeah, sure. Well, this is what we’re supposed to do it, you would just fill it in there, right. But everybody had their own 150 questions. And yeah, it’d be awesome to feed all of that stuff, and to a language model that could take our answers, but apply them to other people’s questions, which might be slightly different, but probably fills out like 80% of the time, they’re the same and matches it all up. Because that was our issue, like, who’s been ours? Like, okay, I’ve answered this before. What was their answer to this one, let me go find the last time I filled out one of these damn questionnaires and go find it. Like it was a total nightmare,

Ken Cox  31:13

Right, which was one of the biggest challenges that we have. And version one has that built in version two, it’s gonna be much nicer. So right now, when a vendor fills out the form, it becomes the default vendor form ID, the problem, no customer can’t give specific questions to that vendor. So as we create the vendor ID and our database, their questionnaire starts building, and then that’s gonna save a lot of time on both sides of the fence.

Matt Watson  31:38

I never thought I would say this regards to security questionnaires. But this is really sexy and exciting.

Ken Cox  31:44

It gets exciting, like, it’s super boring on the level. And when somebody gets it, they’re like, oh, shit, that saves a ton of time.

Matt Watson  31:51

As the guy who’s had to deal with this before, that’s like saving a nightmare about every couple of weeks. Yes. And a big company like, yeah, people that this is what they do all day.

Ken Cox  32:01

Yes. And that’s a nightmare. AI is gonna solve, right, a lot of these really painful long tasks that are, you know, I can’t wait for somebody to just give me a card that I can take to the doctor and say, get my data off this flash drive, and I’ll have to fill out that form every time.

Matt Watson  32:17

Yeah, yeah, it is a lot like that. When you go to the doctor, or chiropractor or whatever they make you fill out all this paperwork. And they’ve already filled this out before just take my previous answers, please. The same kind of thing.

Ken Cox  32:27

Yeah. So yeah, we’re doing that as well, keeping those default answers and checking them quarterly. So the vendor ID cost, you know, we’re providing the vendor ID for no charge to the company that we have, you know, because we’re processing their data for them to give it to the end user. But long term, there’ll be services on that side as well.

Matt Watson  32:45

Okay. All right. Well, I really appreciate having you on the show today. And this has been a fun show. I do a reminder. But if you need to hire software developers, testers, or leaders, Full Scale can help you check us out at FullScale.io. So Ken, as we wrap up the show, is there anything else you want to tell us about if people want to follow you to learn more about your business? You talk about your hosting business, your podcast, or the things people should know about.

Ken Cox  33:08

Yeah, if you want to know more about me in general, KenCox.com is my website. I’ve got, you know, all my anywhere that I’ve been on the podcast before I’ve got that on there. And some other articles that I’ve been that I’ve done and stuff like that, but you know, if you have any, any hosting needs, and you’d like, you know, local private provider, where you’re where you guys.

Matt Watson  33:29

And that’s Hostirian.com?

Ken Cox  33:30

Yes, H-o-s-t-i-r-i-a-n.

Matt Watson  33:34

All right. The well. So, as we wrap up, do you have any final suggestions or words of wisdom out there for other entrepreneurs?

Ken Cox  33:43

Words? If so, the thing that I’m practicing mostly right now is consistently, really trying to always look at multiple perspectives of whatever problem and in my face, right, trying to change a perspective, you know, look at it from my perspective, my employees, my clients, yeah, really trying to just understand as many as many perspectives to a problem as I possibly can, has been a huge benefit for me recently in almost everything that I do in life, right? And it tends to remove a lot of clutter from your life sometimes.

Matt Watson  34:19

Well, I think one of the mistakes we make as entrepreneurs is that we try to solve our own problems, and we don’t validate them with everybody else enough. And so I think that’s kind of part of what you’re speaking to. Right? It’s like you have to validate with everybody else, too.

Ken Cox  34:32

Yes.

Matt Watson  34:34

All right. Well, I read this was Ken Cox, and thank you so much for being on the show today.

Ken Cox  34:38

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Have a great day

Matt Watson  34:40

Thank you.