Rashmy Chatterjee: CEO of Istari
Marc van Zadelhoff: Welcome to Cyber CEOs Decoded where we speak with CEOs from established security giants to up and coming disruptors, getting the inside track on what makes the security company tick. I'm your host, Marc van Zadelhoff, the CEO of Devo. And today my guest is Rashmy Chatterjee, a well-known leader in the cyber community and the CEO of ISTARI. And ISTARI, we'll get into it, is offering a really differentiated platform for cybersecurity companies. Rashmy, welcome to the show.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Marc.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Where are you? Where are you today? What part of the world do I find you in?
Rashmy Chatterjee: At home in London, Friday afternoon. Good time.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah, yeah. I appreciate you doing that. Hopefully, this is your last meeting of the day. I want to just start a bit with ISTARI, maybe not a household name. So maybe, before we get into your background, which is a fascinating background spanning, you know, navies and large companies and entrepreneurial community and cybersecurity in Spain, before we get into all that, you're the CEO of ISTARI. Give us just what is ISTARI. Give us a scope and scale of what you're trying to do at ISTARI before we take a step back and get to know how you got there.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yeah. So the mission of ISTARI is very simple. It's to work with about 250 clients around the world and ensure their cyber resilience. Simple framework but we do it in a different way. We do it with a trusted partner approach. Very strongly believe that cyber resilience is not something that gets off and on with one technology. It's a systematic approach to strengthening your foundation of digital business. And what we do is we also have an investment portfolio. So we have a portfolio of companies where all of which we are fairly significant investors. So the goal is to work with individual clients, understand the cybersecurity requirements for their unique risk appetite, risk landscape and then to address that to our portfolio of companies and to our partnerships. So you know, 200 clients or 250 clients and really control and support them with their cybersecurity programs.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Super. And we're going to return to this. But I think for the listeners it's kind of clear that it's an investment platform, but the first thing you started with is a client orientation, 200 clients that you're actually interacting with, with some sort of go-to-market or consultative team and not just a bunch of spreadsheet people make an investment. So that's a very, like I said, a differentiated approach in the market that I want to get back to.
Rashmy Chatterjee: So it's a supercharger. There's an investment portfolio. And then, on top of that, have a supercharger of a team of very, very senior and very experienced cybersecurity professionals who work with clients. Now, in that process, what they do is they take away the fragmentation that clients struggle with. They take away keeping up with multiple technology, so they just take over and support the client with the requirements. And then, of course, the fact that it's a portfolio that you're deeply invested in allows you to make sure that the delivery is successful as well.
Marc van Zadelhoff: All right. So, Rashmy, I'm going to take a step back like I do with all guests and just say where are you from? Where'd you grow up?
Rashmy Chatterjee: Where am I from? I'm a Singapore citizen. I lived a lot of my life in Singapore, but I grew up in India. So India is still where I spent the first 30 years of my life.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Wow. What part?
Rashmy Chatterjee: It was all over. Born in Agra. My father was in the Air Force, so I changed I think nine schools, you know, before I went into university. All over. It was Kashmir, Allahabad, Gauhati, but mostly in Delhi; and then college was in West Bengal.
Marc van Zadelhoff: I love India. I love the food.
Rashmy Chatterjee: I know.
Marc van Zadelhoff: But a friend of mine, a friend of mine did tell me, I want to get your comment, that the best Indian food can be found in London. Do you stand by this statement or --
Rashmy Chatterjee: It's true. It's very innovative. The Indian food here is very good.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Amazing. Growing up, what was the first time you made a buck, how you made some money, a paid job?
Rashmy Chatterjee: I mean, of course, as you know, I grew up in India. I'm an Indian girl. So the first money I made was when I joined my first job. They will know summer jobs and things, no. So I made money when I joined my first job, and that was with the Navy.
Marc van Zadelhoff: That's funny. So that's not -- yeah. That doesn't happen there in that way. You don't -- yeah.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Maybe now. It's been a while. But, no, not that year.
Marc van Zadelhoff: That's funny. Yeah. Maybe shifting into your career, you were one of the first women to attend the India's top technical institute. And also, as I seem to remember from when we were working together, one of the first female officers or the first female officer in the Indian Navy. I'd love for you to just chart out that chapter of your career and what it was like to be such an outlier in both those decisions.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yeah. I continued to be an outlier. So the first thing that you can see, you know, which is very common to both the institute I went to was the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. So in both the IIT and the Navy, there is no gender equality. In IIT, I was not the first woman. But the percentage of women was very low, maybe 3%, something like 2, 3%. I was the first woman to join my department, which was Naval Architecture. And, in the Indian Navy, I was the first woman to join as an engineer, as an officer and as an engineer. So not a very normal kind of, you know, 18- to 25-, 30-year-old experience. It teaches you a lot, makes you have great friends. In IIT, we were a very small set of girls. We have been friends for 43 years now. In fact, they are all here very soon in a week to celebrate something with me. So we're very close. You also make great friendships, both in IIT and in the Navy. You know, you learn to sort of identify people you can trust, work with, have fun with. And that stays for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. But IIT, just give us a sense here because everybody who listens to this has colleagues that grew up in India. You can't in the US and in the UK escape the Indian entrepreneurs in the IT space. And some have gone to the IIT, and I've understood from some of them that the acceptance rates are crazy, right? It's like, you know, is it 10,000 people apply and 100 get in? I mean, it's crazy elite. Let's be -- let's be open about it. It's I think the acceptance rate is something like.1%. But that also has something to do with the denominator, right? India is a well-populated country, a lot of people apply. When I went to IIT, they weren't defined by IITs, and I don't know how many people they took every year. But, you know, clearly it was maybe 1000 or something. It's very difficult to get into IIT. People like getting into IIT because it's sort of your validity check, you know. From there on, life is much easier. Jobs are easier. Opportunities are easier. And then I think it's harder now. When I applied, I knew that it was going to be very difficult to get in. But I don't think it had -- we hadn't had all the successes. We had not seen all the successes that you see today, right? You have Sundar Pichai and a large number of stalwarts around the world who have come from IIT, so I think the reputation is grown. But it was always very difficult to get.
Marc van Zadelhoff: So you must have had a penchant for engineering and maths and all that in high school, in your secondary education.
Rashmy Chatterjee: I love math. And I like logic, and engineering is quite logical.
Marc van Zadelhoff: I always joke to people I have a liberal arts degree and an MBA. So, you know, whenever I talk to engineers, I say speak slowly. But I think after 20 years in cybersecurity, I can fake it, although my head of engineering will not agree with that statement if he were on the program here. And, in the Navy, give us a sense. You were -- you studied Naval architecture and design. And then you're in the Navy. Were you ever -- did you ever end up doing tours on boats and submarines, or were you more --
Rashmy Chatterjee: No. I joined the Warship Design Office. We were a group of people who are responsible for warship design. And this was a very exciting time in the Indian Navy because the Indian Navy had decided that they wanted to develop indigenous capability. They want -- you know, otherwise they were buying most ships and submarines from Germany or Russia, etc. And they decided the entire process, from design to manufacturing, production, everything should become Indian, was sort of what we call critical infrastructure today, right? They wanted it --
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah.
Rashmy Chatterjee: So it was a super time to be there. The first job I was given was to participate in a project where we were asking for large amount of funding to move the capability in-house. And what, you know, it was designing of warship, strength, stability, all the things you do in engineering. Of course there was a lot of time spent in the ships, all different types, frigates, corvettes, submarines. And we got the approval for the project. We set up the first CAD CAM center. I actually ran that CAD CAM center. I got a record, a commendation from the President of India for that, very exciting time. So you set up -- you decided the technology. You train the people. You found the real estate. And then you connected the design to the production facilities, the shipyards. So it was huge, huge and exciting.
Marc van Zadelhoff: And, I mean, we have so much left to go on, obviously, inclusion and diversity. And you and I, you were involved with that more actively but when I was working with you at IBM. I know it's a passion of yours. But I know that we've come quite a long way. I mean, back then, should I picture you having to constantly defend that a woman could do this, a woman could have good ideas? Like, what was the culture for a woman entering into the Indian Navy at that time? Or was it -- was it not so bad as that?
Rashmy Chatterjee: Oh, I think it was total cluelessness. Why is she here and what is happening here. Like why? She has a husband. He works and earns well. And so what is happening here? It was I think clueless. But I had a -- I had a fabulous boss, Admiral Rahman. And I don't think Admiral Mohammad Rahman saw who was female or male. He just saw several people who had to get a job done and they'd better do it well. So he was just great to keep everyone sort of focused on what needs to get done. But, yeah, they were quite puzzled.
Marc van Zadelhoff: I always think that there should be -- because you and I have talked about this. There's some movie with like Matt Damon and a whole bunch of famous people, probably not Matt Damon but Bollywood actors, right, and about you just accomplishing great things against all odds, against all odds.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Oh, I would so much like to be Matt Damon instead. That sounds not a bad option.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Well, I think it's amazing. But I think, you know, for people listening, for women starting in cybersecurity, you didn't start in cybersecurity but hopefully we've come quite away from those days. And, as I said, have a long way to go. But so you end up at IBM for an amazing career at IBM of 20 years plus. And do you just, like, sit at the Indian Navy in that office that you had set up and just send your resume to IBM? How does that work? How does one go from the Indian Navy to IBM?
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yeah. So I was in the Navy for almost 10 years. And that was a time when the medical -- the bureaucracy started to get to me, you know. It's a great organization. But if you want to work hard and move faster, it isn't -- it didn't encourage that gene. So I kind of knew that it was time for me to do something else. IBM was a very good option. I was very well connected in the industry because, in our process of setting up the CAD CAM center, there was the Silicon Graphics, IBM, a large number of ATL. Each -- we spent -- knew everyone quite well. And, of course, there were a lot of choices. But I always loved IBM because I felt, as a client, IBM really focused on the client value. You know, this is why I've always been a big fan of the IBM client, client partners, the MTs because the focus is to make it all about the clients. So that was not a very difficult decision. The moment they approached me, I took up the offer. And next thing I know is I'm responsible for public sector sales, having never heard the word sales in my life.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Wow. Yeah. Amazing, amazing. And you joined in India or in Singapore at this point.
Rashmy Chatterjee: I joined in India and then moved a year later to Hong Kong.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Got it. And so what was that transition like? Was that easy? Was it --
Rashmy Chatterjee: So, you know, there's two things about the transition which are very relevant now when I look back. So, first of all, I joined IBM in India, and then my husband got an offer to move to Hong Kong. He was with Bank of America. And my first reaction was two little kids, maybe it's time to leave and spend some time with them, that I had a lot of support in India from my parents. So I went to IBM and I said, I have to -- you know, husband's moving. I think I'm going to resign. And the flexibility that they showed. They said, Why do you have to resign? Go on leave of absence. Come back, talk to us after three months. See how you're feeling then [inaudible 00:14:51] time. It was such a different -- such an accommodating approach. So I moved to Hong Kong. I take three months leave, came back. Worked, you know, something like five hours a day for four days a week while the kids settled down in school. And then, one year back, I was back full time. So when we talk about keeping women in the workforce, I just really strongly believe listen to what is it that they're trying to solve for because there are so many ways to -- there's always periods of time that you need to pass. You have to pass. And if somebody supports you at that time, you know, suddenly you will have a very devoted employee for a long time. I was at IBM for 23 years after that. So I think that was one. And the second thing that was very exciting is, when I joined IBM in Hong Kong, we were setting up the software business. We had little pieces, and we still had DB2 and MQ. And then there was a big time that we acquired Lotus and then we acquired Tivoli. So IBM's complexion was changing from being a hardware company to a software company. And, again, clean sheet of people to sit down and design how we're going to build this business, what really matters, you know, some amount of funding but how do you use that funding to make software. IBM was not known as a software company. So we kind of focused on four things. I still remember so well. One was government relationships because government was a big buyer. The other one was the importance of ISVs. So really, really went and spent a lot of time with ISVs, set up ISV solution development centers. The third was partner systems integrators, your, you know, TCS, HCl, etc. And then the fourth one was to get known to be something. And we chose that time to be very close to the open source, open source message with Java and Linux. So it was very exciting. I think the IBM software revenue in Asia Pacific was maybe two or three single digit millions, and it is double digit billions now, if not more.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Rashmy Chatterjee: So it was a very, very exciting time. And, you know, you kind of realize how much software is about the ecosystem, right?
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah. That's true. And you learned that lesson early on. I'm going to pivot us to I think to your entre into cybersecurity. And I remember that moment because that's when you and I met. But maybe you can walk us through because I believe you were in Singapore at the time and then moved to the US.
Rashmy Chatterjee: I was in Singapore. And I had indicated to Arvind, who's now the CEO, that at some point, you know, it would be good to move to the US. And I still remember when he called me and said, you know, we are acquiring this company. And I think you should move here, and I think you should be the integration executive. And sitting in Singapore at that time, I was responsible for quite a large business. I taught Q1 labs on the base mall, so I said so I have to move across the world, and I don't know what is this company. And he said, Just do it. It's very exciting. You will love it. And that was -- I came and met Brendan.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Brendan Hannigan who was the CEO of Q1 Labs, now the CEO of Sonrai. He's been on the show as well. Yeah.
Rashmy Chatterjee: And just started. It was -- and that was spec time. I think there was a few of us. There was you who was one of the first people I spoke to. And, actually, very, very good conversation, but I still feel you were the first one who simplified. You know, otherwise, everyone I was talking to was talking apps. And, you know, this is what we need to do for identity. This is what we need to understand. This is what we need. But I think that picture, what was it called? Immunity?
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah. The security framework. The IBM security framework. And then eventually the immune system, I think.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Immune system, so good. So I think you [inaudible 00:18:50]. It was Michael Lauria, Steve. Yeah. So I -- that was my transition, the job I was given very little time to accept it. But once I accepted it, the next thing I was there. And, as you know, integrations only 12 to 18 months, so there was not a day to day.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah. And so what did you think after getting through the terminology and the acronyms, like you said? What did you think of cybersecurity as, you know, coming midcareer, as they say, into cybersecurity versus early career? What -- because I frankly don't know anything but. What, are we all crazy in cybersecurity? What's the deal?
Rashmy Chatterjee: Coming from the outside I believe was good because I have some convictions today that come from that outside-in approach. I think that cybersecurity is here to stay, right? We are all going to ultimately live in a digital world. There will be 8, 10 billion people who spend much of their life on digital platforms. So it is going to be a way of life, and we have to figure out a way to be secure by focusing on things that are most important. So first thing I do believe is that the fragmentation and the stridency of the fragmentation is not -- does not serve the industry well. We talk often about pieces, but you could be fabulously secure on every piece and not be secure in how they're put together, how they're organized, how they're managed, how governance is done, and so many aspects. So I do very strongly believe in that, in that business language, in the ability to make the components part of a whole strategy versus making the components the strategy. I think that was helpful coming from. You know, the acronyms, when I went to the Navy, there were a lot of acronyms, go anywhere.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Sure.
Rashmy Chatterjee: That's -- especially if you're going to a big company, acronyms will be there. But the inability to step up, I would say the challenge is in being able to step up beyond the -- this is really important too. Okay. From a client perspective, what are the challenges they have? And is it one size fits all?
Marc van Zadelhoff: Perfect. I feel like we could spend a lot of time on IBM, but I -- if you're okay because there's so much there, I want to move back to ISTARI because you got a ton done at IBM. And I think, like I said, there's a book and a movie in at least one of each for your life at some point, with or without Matt Damon. But I want to get to you. You spent two decades at IBM, and then you got into Temasek and ISTARI. And I'd love to just get a sense of that transition and then get into ISTARI and rehash that and then get into a couple of topics I want to ask you about. So your transition from IBM into this world. How did you end up in this world? So I had no intention to leave. I'd been with IBM for 23 years old -- 23 years. I was in New York. There was no definitive plan to leave. I think when Temasek, when I spoke to Temasek, it was I loved what they were trying to do. It was not going to be easy, but I just think it's visionary. And the problem they were trying to solve was this, that cybersecurity is very important. It's important to them as investors. And, actually, it poses one of the biggest risks to their capital. Second is that cybersecurity is often delegated to a technology discussion. And that is because it's a very fragmented market. So the question was, is there something we could do that really simplifies the way a client can become more secure without jumping too quickly into the pieces? So this idea of could you think of a model where we had very experienced cybersecurity leaders working with clients and helping them get more secure, but they weren't actually pitching a product or a service. They were actually pitching what the client really needed. So that was the problem they were trying to solve. I loved it. And the idea was that, to solve this client's problem, you will have an investment fund; $2 billion was kept aside. Let me just take a step back on Temasek because maybe people know it, some people don't. Can you give us a sentence on what is Temasek exactly?
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yeah. Temasek is Singapore's largest sovereign fund. Very big investor, very strategic. Yeah. Very successful.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Okay. Got it. Great.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yes. So I thought what they were trying to do was brilliant. I mean, I really felt that is what the cyber industry had been waiting for. The market was very vendor-driven, you know, lots of vendors, lots of anxiety, lots of if you don't do this, this will happen. To really flip it over to a client model, that's a lot less strident because this is not going away. This is not like, for the next three years, you have to wait. This is going to be there for a long time. So to tone it down and to really start saying, okay. Year on year, how do I get better? You know. How do I get better? What are the new threats? How do I get better? And, actually, that's why your marketing, you're a marketing genius, actually. But that's why we chose the name ISTARI because ISTARI is not about getting it right, getting hard, getting killed, all of that. It is a navigator. It's the people who will help you get better, get safer. So ISTARI comes from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Yeah.
Marc van Zadelhoff: I mean, you started this. You -- this is quite entrepreneurial. You have a big backer with Temasek. But I remember at the time that you moved to London and you literally hung up a shingle and started writing your business plan and formulating ideas and getting feedback, and that was a process you went through. Yeah. Really. I mean, I'm not -- it is not exaggerated. There was an idea, and there was a really good investor. I liked the way Temasek approached it. And we sat down in Singapore. I moved to Singapore for a few months. Oh, I forgot that phase. Yeah.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Started drawing it out. What should it look like? What kind of people do we need? What kind of -- is it should we focus on the portfolio side and investment returns? Or should we focus on the go-to market side and first build the supercharged layer. So that's what we started doing. The move to London. I was in Singapore for six months. And, remember, all this is happening when COVID strikes. So I moved to London, actually, in the middle of COVID, hired the team. But the CEO of Temasek had given me very good advice. When we were first talking, I was thinking, you know, how? How do I set this up? What is the platform? How do I do this? And he said the biggest scarcity in cybersecurity today is talent. Find the right talent, and the rest will develop. So -- and that I feel very good about. I think we have really got talented people who have shared the culture of just obsession with client success.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Amazing. Yeah. Can you give a sense of scale how many portfolio companies, how many folks on the team? I don't know if you can give a sense of scale.
Rashmy Chatterjee: So we have, as I said, the investment capital itself is 2 billion. We've invested about 1.3. Our investment approach is also very different. It's much more longer term. It's strategic, and it's very much aligned to client needs. Today in the portfolio we have nine companies and four VCs. So the VCs are very strong partners because they also provide a lot of input.
Marc van Zadelhoff: You mean you are also an LP in other VCs through that. Got it? Okay. Limited partner.
Rashmy Chatterjee: And then we have a team. Actually, you will remember the word Jedi. We have a team of cybersecurity experts. We've got about 30 client-facing experts. And, you know, one of the things culturally I really wanted to build was a spirit of the freedom of being an entrepreneur, you know. So when we were starting to build the team, if my early interviews, if somebody said they are fabulous in building teams and motivating teams, ISTARI was not the right place for them because the dream of ISTARI was that you should be super qualified, super experienced, but you should be super comfortable picking up your backpack and going to wherever we need to go. So it was never structured as extremely hierarchical.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Amazing, amazing. And your experience in the ecosystem that you mentioned in the early days of software, the early, early days of software, you're doing that now because you have a huge ecosystem of partners. You mentioned those four VCs, and I'll let you mention any of the ones you want to mention. But I see at LinkedIn and the press, there's a not just the impact of those Jedis that you mentioned but also the impact of that whole ecosystem. So you've taken that into this business as well.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Very much about the collective. So we have a company called Sygnia. Fabulous, very strong incident response, OT. I always think, if you're in trouble, you want Sygnia by your side. They're very, very deep. Ensign, which is Asia's largest cybersecurity, pure play.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yep. And a partner of Devos, I will say.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Oh, very good. So you're part of that ecosystem.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Exactly.
Rashmy Chatterjee: We recently enlisted with Axio, which is risk quantification. Huge believer that the cyber discussion has to eventually become just a risk discussion, you know. So I won't go through all of them. There's a large number. There's Clarity, which is an OT company. Very big part of my business is also BlueVoyant, which is headquartered in New York but internal and external digital risk management, supply chain defense, etc. So we have a very good set of companies, and we work very closely with them.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Amazing. All right. We're going to shift to two topics you and I agreed would be fun to highlight. And the first one is on life and work and how do we keep these two in check with each other. And you've mentioned your better half, your husband also has an amazing, amazingly successful career. And you have two kids who I've I think met at least one of your two children.
Rashmy Chatterjee: One grandchild.
Marc van Zadelhoff: And you do it all, right? And one grandchild. That's right. That's incredible. Incredible. Sorry. I don't know how I forgot that. So tell us how this works for you and how -- you know, I'm trying to avoid using the word balance, but let's put it out there. How do you balance? Because I, you know, and it's not a -- it's a question I deal with as a father, husband, and a CEO; and you deal with it as a mother and a wife and a CEO. So how does that work? How does it work for you?
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yeah. And, you know, you will have very good insights of your own that you have four daughters. So I, firstly, you know, somebody once told me, oh, work/life balance means work first, and then balance will come when you're retired. I don't believe that. I think when you're -- when you're building an organization or when you want to be successful, you want to tap into the best talent. And the best talent is distributed. And, you know, at least 50% of the best talent is women. So how do you make something work that accommodates each individual's journey? I think the big difference between a career and a job, a career is for a long time. So I am a big believer that you have to be balanced first as an employee. You know, you have to have a good sense of what's most important at one time. If you want everything at the same time, you want to have kids, you want the staff promotion, you want to relocate all at the same time, it becomes a weak link. It becomes a point that you might say this is too difficult; maybe I should just give it up. So, you know, careers today are 40, 45 years. Take your time to balance it out and enjoy the different aspects. And I think then employees have to support that ability for employees to do that, as long as they contribute, as long as the business delivers what it needs to deliver. But I think, from both sides, I do believe that it's not about having it all. It's about just the simple fact that there's a lot of talent that gets out of the workforce, either because they try to do too much too soon or because the employment environment doesn't provide you with enough options.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. And getting into some tactical, I mean, you mentioned one, which was, tactically, you were able to work a five-hour week and build back up as you moved into Hong Kong, for example. I know, for me, you mentioned, I remember when I -- when we were having our daughters, three, by the way. At one point, my wife just said, you know, I understand you're busy. And she was working as well. You know, can you just block six to eight on your calendar every day? Because you know, when you have babies, as you know, especially with your grandchild, right, six to eight is a crazy time, right? They need to eat and then they sleep. And then she's like, after eight, you can go back to work. I don't care. But, you know, so I used to block that. And I used to block it in my IBM calendar and said unless, you know, basically, Ginni Rometty or, you know, somebody really important needs me, I'm going to try and take these two hours to just focus on the family. Did you do -- did you have some techniques like that, that kept you in a little bit of a balance?
Rashmy Chatterjee: Exactly the same. So I think calendaring is everything. Calendaring, you know, we, both my husband and I, would sit down at least once a week. And we had this running calendar for 12, 18 months. When are the kids' parent/teachers meetings? Just when is my travel? When is his travel? All of that calendaring is a very -- because it avoids surprises, right? So I think calendar is huge. I also think that you need to be healthy. You have to look after yourself. So exercise is normally the one that goes out to the window when you're trying to do a lot. So that is not a great idea because it builds stress. And, you know, now, of course, there's a lot of discussion about this remote working, hybrid working, etc. But human interaction at work is motivating. And it's empowering. So, to some level, those are healthy habits for a long career.
Marc van Zadelhoff: The other one I want to ask you about is how did you and your husband make decisions? I mean, he moved to Hong Kong, or he moved to Hong Kong for his work, but I think you moved from Singapore to the US for your work.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yeah. So, in general, Hong Kong was his thing. Hong Kong to Singapore was mine. And then New York was sort of both; and then London was, of course, very much me. How do you make it? Firstly, I think we both assume that both of us will work all the time. So that option of one person giving up doesn't come up that often, has actually never come up because I feel we are both qualified. We both like working. And it's part of our identity. So that's one. Then the second thing is you kind of operate as a home unit, right. As a unit, there are times when the kids are younger, perhaps it's a family unit dynamic. And it's different for each family. But, in the end, there's an income that comes in, and it's used to provide better opportunities for yourself, for your family, for your children, look after your parents, all the things that, you know, we want to do. So if you look at it as a whole, it seems easier then. It seems easier to make decisions.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Awesome. I'm going to keep us moving, and I'm sure people can reach out to you on LinkedIn and ask more about work/life balances. So much mentoring to be done in this area because I think some people are, if you lose sight of it, then to your -- I mean, your friend who gave you the advice, right, of first you work and then you -- and then you live life, and that's the balance. I wonder if they were able to stay married with that philosophy, right. So that's you have to stay happy and married and whatever gets you going. Second topic. You know, you are both a CEO now, and you're on several boards. And you've done quite a bit of research started recently, put out a report on CEO report on resilience, cyber resiliency. So I wanted to maybe a little quicker than I intended but just get your sense on the role the CEO plays in managing risk and in cybersecurity and your perspective as a board member, as a CEO and some of the insights from the report. And then will draw to a close.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Yeah. I think we put up this report because, you know, we always kept hearing CEOs must be responsible for cybersecurity. And you're seeing the, you know, the governance laws that are coming into place, right, about board members requiring cybersecurity experience. There was a lot of information about -- from companies about what CEOs should do. We thought, let's ask CEOs, what do they feel about cybersecurity? I think the three things that came out is, number one, they all feel cybersecurity is one of the top three risks. So it's very important. The second thing is they feel they really trying to solve the problem hiring good person, hire a great CISO, put in more money. But the third thing is they don't know if they feel more secure, you know. So it's telling.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Well, it's kind of the worst combination of three things, right? It's like --
Rashmy Chatterjee: It's really important, throwing money into it, but I don't know if I'm feeling more secure.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Yeah. I don't know -- I don't want my house to burn down, and it may be on fire.
Rashmy Chatterjee: But then we sort of work through that. And I guess the simple -- the headline is that, because of the way the cyber market's grown, as I said, very fragmented, very stride, and very insight driven, to turn it around, you know, what has happened as a reaction of that is that this is a tech problem. And we look at in this chart red, orange, green, that we're either safe or not safe. But I think just being able to convert that, firstly, into business language. You know, as this company, this is what's most valuable to us, etc. You know, how do you -- what is it that you plan to mitigate? What is it that you plan to leave? What is it you plan to ensure, all those things. And to pull the CEO in the journey, of course, from our research, our recommendation was certain things for the CEO as well. They have blind trust moving to informed trust; from, you know, sort of they all say they feel accountable. But how do you build core responsibility? It's like the general thing. I know that when I'm -- I have to, when there's a problem, I will lead the charge. But you have to know your troops, and you have to know your strategy and your formation. So I think those were some of the things that clear -- I mean, CEOs have managed to amass very complicated things, financial risk, legal risk, geopolitical risk, which is crazy. So how do you really learn to get a lot more comfortable talking about cybersecurity risk.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Along with, when we post this podcast, I'll post a link to the report. It's a really interesting read and easy read. Rashmy, I'm going to close us out on that. It's a good place to close things out on. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your insights with me on the podcast today.
Rashmy Chatterjee: Thank you for inviting me. And great to see you again.
Marc van Zadelhoff: Likewise. And thank you to our audience for listening today. Be sure to join us for the next episode of Cyber CEOs Decoded. Rashmy, appreciate it.
