As remote work continues to expand, new challenges arise as a leader of an organization. Digital communication presents so many great benefits, but it also creates huge liabilities.
Our guest today is Shiran Weitzman who is a digital and cyber security expert, especially when it comes to dealing with communication on digital channels. He is the CEO and co-founder of Shield, which helps organizations in reducing the risks associated with electronic communications and uncover hidden insights such as inside dealing, unlawful behavior, and privacy matters.
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Shiran Weitzman is the CEO and Co-Founder at Shield, a regulatory technology software company specializing in eComms record-keeping and compliance data analytics. Shield helps organizations in reducing the risks associated with electronic communications and uncover hidden insights such as inside dealing, unlawful behavior, and privacy matters, resulting in greater operational efficiency and reduced costs. It’s currently being used in top-tier banks, leading tech companies, and large organizations, with promising and successful results.
He has over 15 years of technology and management expertise, mainly in the Financial Services vertical. Shiran was previously the Head of Sales at TM-Group, where he was in charge of the company’s primary tier one bank accounts. Shiran brings to Shield many years of experience as a trusted advisor and subject matter expert in the financial compliance market; another testament tohis expertise in his field is when he joined the Forbes Finance Council as a member last 2020.
Shiran holds an MBA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BA in Computer Science from IDC Herzliya. With his deep expertise in financial services and electronic communications in the workplace,
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (00:00):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success Podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as remote work continues to expand, new challenges arise for you as the leader of your organization. Digital communication presents so many great benefits, but it also creates huge liabilities. And that’s exactly why I wanted to have our guest today, who is Shiran Weitzman, who’s a digital and cybersecurity expert, especially when it comes to dealing with communication on digital channels. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Shield, which helps organizations in reducing the risks associated with electronic communications and also to help uncover hidden insights such as inside dealing, unlawful behavior, and privacy matters. So let’s go ahead and jump right into my interview.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (01:02):
So my name is Shiran Weitzman. I’m from Israel, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Shield. Shield, the full name is Shield Financial Compliance, but we go with Shield, like Madonna. Yeah.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (01:18):
Great, great. Well, one of the reasons I was excited to have you on the show here is to talk about what you do and really help companies through. And it’s this idea of communication and communication liabilities and things that exist. And really, I am not familiar with this, so part of this is just a discovery for myself to learn a little bit more about this. But I thought, “Well, if I don’t know much about this, there are probably a bunch of other folks out there who don’t know either.” So I’d love to talk about this idea of workplace misconduct, just to get started. In the online and remote world we’re living in with so many more people working from home or working part-time from home, how does workplace misconduct happen? Talk through a little bit about this and what that even means and how you handle that.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (02:14):
So, it is true. In the financial industry, this is something that it’s well-regulated and it’s been here for several years. But for the general business, I think it was a huge leap since COVID started and everyone moved to remote work. But I would not put it only on COVID. I would say that it’s a trend. It’s a trend that happens because of digitalization of everything that we do because of this iPhone thinking, because of everything that happens around that, which is good. It’s business enablement, right? The ability to use our mobile communication and the ability to use different enterprise communication. All your customers are probably using Slack or Teams, right? We are taking this conversation while you are in the US and I’m in Israel, and doing it via Teams or via Zoom. And it’s fantastic audio quality and fantastic video quality. And we are exchanging emails like we are speaking with each other every day. And that’s the revolution of the digital communication.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (03:26):
And I would say humans, they started to communicate everywhere, right? Before that, we needed to travel in order to communicate. We needed to send letters, right? Nowadays, we are communicating everywhere we want. We can post our feeling via Instagram, via Facebook. Soon we will communicate face-to-face via the metaverse or whatever other thing it will be. Things are happening.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (03:52):
But in the basic of things, in the baseline, people always, like the social animal that we are, it doesn’t matter if we are behind the computer or behind the screen, we need and like to communicate in order to do our job, in order to be productive, in order to feel alive, in order to exchange ideas. This is the only way that we knew how to do things. In the past, we used to fly over. When I was in sales, we used to fly over in order to exchange information and to do a demo. Now we are doing it, we are doing exactly the same thing, just we are remote, remote tools, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (04:32):
So this digital transformation and digital revolution that really accelerated over the last, I want to say 20 years, but really 10 years, is really changing the way that we are operating and working. If you really think about the changes that happened in the last 10 years, just think what will happen in 20 years from now, or 10 years or 20 years from now, the amount of changes and the acceleration of it.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (04:56):
So it happens. It’s here. And we are communicating. And humans are humans. We want to speak. We want to do things. We want to exchange information. We also are doing bad things, so bad actors exist everywhere. It exists while we are in the office, and there is this pervert guy that can do things or can say bad words or can behave badly, or can be super, too much friendly, right? It can happen. It can happen the same way via remote.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (05:28):
Recent studying, I can share with you the link it. It was posted in the New York Times. There was a big article on it, that during COVID they did a study and found out that there is a 40 something percent increase of sexual harassment during the remote work, and it all happened on digital communications. Now you are saying, “Hey, come on. People are stupid.” But people are. People are people. They’re not stupid, yet people are behaving like people, right? The same way that people can do horrible things when they’re in an office place, it comes to their narcissism, to all sorts of other challenges that they are. But people are people, so the behavior is happening in a certain way, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (06:24):
And our job at Shield, you asked me what is it that we are doing? So we are an expert in two things. One, in digital communication, in humans communication, we understand all sorts of human communication as long as it is digital, it has a digital form. It can be audio recording, it can be written communication chat, it can be a mobile communication, it can be an email, or it can be something else, financial chat, communication. Any way of digital representation of human communication, we are the expert, worldwide. We know how to capture. We know how to manage. We know how to manipulate. We know how to structure. We know how to enrich. We know how to do things with it that eventually can bring value, can bring value to the business.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (07:09):
The second thing that we do is the understanding of the human behaviors, and specifically detecting the bad actors, right? This is why primarily financial services are mandated to do that. But that’s what we are tasked with, right? Find the bad actors in the organization, primarily trying to manipulate the market and have an advantage so they can earn more money. But on the other side, dealing with conduct, trying to conceal information, trying to conduct fraud, trying to harass, trying to use bad languages, and all sorts of bad behaviors, we are tasked to find.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (07:54):
Currently, we are looking at it as a risk, right? In the future, we also look at it, “Okay. There is a lot of other good things that happen in communication, not only the bad, right?” Let’s put it also in a frame. 99.9% of the people that we see in our platform are good, decent people. That’s also important to say, right? The problem is always with the… People can be the biggest asset of a firm, it can be also the biggest challenge, right? Because you only need one person to click an attachment to open up for a cyber attack for the firm, right? So educating employees and also monitoring a certain behavior is the critical part of what we are doing. And we are doing it on any type of communication. It will be social media. Any type of digital representation of human exchanging ideas, it can be one-to-one, it can be many-to-one, it can be many-to-many.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (08:53):
Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that. And as I’m thinking about just the breadth, just the scope of digital communication that people in general are going through, there’s so much. And so, certainly standard things I would imagine are part of this, company email, maybe text messages. But what about messages that are happening on a company Zoom call that’s happening between people that you might not be seeing? Or I’m just thinking off the top of my head right now, or a message from someone’s Facebook page that’s not a company page, but they’re posting something that may be damaging to the brand. I don’t know. I’m just thinking about that. What are some examples or some stories that you can share to help give us some insight on that?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (09:48):
So let’s get the practicality. We are not replacing the NSA, right? If they are listening to this conversation or to your email, it’s their problem. It’s a US thing, right? We are not replacing them. It’s not that, right? We are an enterprise platform that is set to help the firm monitor their employees’ communication. Now, if the firm decides that, and the employee approves, right? You need to have a consent with the employee, that a Facebook is a viable… They are allowing everyone to communicate via their Facebook account or to do something with their mobile account, right? Then it’s a company approved channel, and then we need to monitor it, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (10:35):
But it’s not… Look. Between you and me, we are communicating now via Zoom, right. And it’s a monitored channel by your company or my company, then it will be recorded. But if you and I want to conceal information and to talk about secret things, we can find 20 different channels that are not monitored in five minutes, right? I can send you 21 of them if you want. It’s not a problem.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (11:06):
That’s not what we are trying to find. We are trying to monitor and protect the general employees, right? And to protect the firm from things that can happen, right? So if you, as a firm, provided Zoom as a viable channel for your employees to communicate internally and externally, and someone is doing something via this Zoom channel, you would be amazed what we heard of people doing via Zoom, all sorts of pictures and all sort of things are being done there. You heard the story of people forgetting that the video camera is on and doing all sorts of nasty and gross things. All sort of things can happen, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (11:55):
So we, as an organization, we want to protect the organization and I also want to protect my employees, right? So I want to be able to know if something like that happens. If someone is sexually harassing some other employee, or just harassing, just being a bully on other employees, I want to know that, right? I want to know if someone is taking information that he shouldn’t take, right, is trying to steal information. Just recently, yesterday I think, I saw that a big shot in Apple was sacked and he was trading insider information, right? Yeah, yeah. He knew he was in the legal department in Apple. I think it was Apple, but nevermind.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (12:46):
There are tons of cases like this, that he was exposed to certain information, and he took advantage of it, right? Either send it to a friend, either did something, doesn’t matter, usage of insider information in order to gain profit. It happens even not in a trading company, in any public company. People that are exposed to information can do all sorts with it, but they are breaking the law. And you, as an organization, provided them the tools that they are allowed to do that, so you have a sort of responsibility for that. That’s our job.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (13:25):
Well, that is pretty alarming to hear that, to think about that potential liability or risk that’s hanging out there. So certainly, your company provides services to help support that. But maybe as a starting point, if someone’s going to listen into this, they’re the leader of their business, of their organization. Maybe they’re the owner, they’re the president, they’re the CEO, and they’re now saying, “Okay. Well, this is great Shiran, but how can I handle these challenges? What can I do, maybe an initial step or two, to start thinking about or implementing that I could do pretty quickly to start getting a sense of this?”
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (14:11):
First of all, I would like them to know that there is a problem. There is a potential challenge here. First of all, they need to acknowledge that, right? I am a CEO of a startup. I’m providing solutions to customers. They are hosted in our Cloud platform. I’m aware of the cyber risk. And because I’m aware, we are investing tons of work and money and solutions and protections on top of it in order to… Is it Fort Knox almost, right? And it costs a lot of money, but we do that because we understand the risk of it, right? We understand what can be the impact if something doesn’t work. And we respect the data of our customers and how truthful, or how they are trusting us, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (15:08):
I would like the CEOs of the companies to know that they are providing, they have hundreds of employees, right, that are communicating. And something, he doesn’t see everything. They cannot see what everyone are telling everyone. And you know what? It’s not necessarily that I care to be in all emails and all conversations, but do I want to know if someone is breaking the law? Yeah. Do I want to know if someone is doing something in the verge of being illegal or being conduct? I need to know, because it’s a risk for me as a CEO, because eventually it will flow to us as a company. And I will need to explain or to pay the bill, the legal expenses or the settlement with the employee or with someone else. It happens. It’s reality. It happens every day with every company, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (16:02):
Now, let’s prove that someone said something to someone. If you don’t have the tools, if you don’t have the system, if you cannot prove it, we are in the business of detecting things and evidencing, right? And everything is written these days, or verbally said, right? Everything. Think about it. In the past, we were meeting in the corridor and we were writing on papers. Now, everything is digital, so there is a digital footprint of everything. Do something with it. At least know that there is something here that can happen. Know your risk.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (16:41):
Even if you don’t do anything, just know that there is a black hole of your employees. You’re giving them an email. You’re giving them Slack. You’re giving them Zoom. You’re giving them Teams. You’re giving them a mobile device. People are talking. People are exchanging information. People are taking pictures. People are doing all sorts of things. Know that there is a funnel of communication that happens, that things are being said there. Now, I don’t know. Maybe it’s like a sentence every year. Still, if this is the risky one, I want to be aware of it, or at least know that there is a challenge here, right. There is a risk. That’s it.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (17:20):
Now I don’t want to frighten everyone, because until now everyone was super happy. We are providing. We are an agile company. We are providing people that communicate these business enablement. It’s all true. It is a business enablement tools, or we are talking about business enablement. But we are humans, right? So humans are trying to go…
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (17:45):
Right. Well, and like you said, there are bad actors. Right? So whether it’s digital communication, whether it’s in person, there’s the unfortunate, that the bad one bad apple spoils the bunch kind of a thing, where it’s that one person that’s not behaving or they’re misusing the tools that have been provided to them.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (18:09):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that’s the business. Now look, in our current business, we are mainly focusing on financial services, so it’s doing exactly everything that they said. But instead of not only looking for conduct, but looking for risk and market risk, so ability for people to do market manipulation and front-running and all sorts of market manipulation that will give them extra gain, so they will be rich, they will get more money, they will be able to have a better profit, they will be able to provide much better income to their company, all sorts of things like that. But it’s the same thing. It’s bad actor at the end of the day.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (18:54):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s interesting. And as I hear you talking about this, it makes me think maybe even a first step, and I’m curious your thought on this, would just be making sure that there’s some kind of a, I don’t know if it would be a policy or practice or something that’s included in, just something simple to send a notice out to your staff or an update to maybe an employee handbook, just to say, “We expect certain conduct, a certain level of professionalism or something.” I don’t know. What would you say to something like that?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (19:32):
So, first of all, every company, I hope, have a conduct policy, right? And perhaps the conduct policy needs to be refreshed. But I think that during these days, I absolutely agree. You need to do some sort of a training, what is expected or a policy. Write a policy and do a training once a year, twice a year, “Guys, what’s expected of you while you are in the digital era when you are communicating via all sorts of channels internally and with customers.” I would say most of the people, again, 90 something percent of the people knows, understands how to behave. But sometimes, it’s better to say it than to be sorry, afterwards, right? So yes. Be aware that there is a challenge, even if you don’t implement anything.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (20:26):
And by the way, I’m not saying that general customers need to do something at the moment, but at least know that there is a big island or big oceans of data that is running through your company that you don’t know anything about. So just be aware of it and train your people, put some standards, put some policy in place. You are absolutely right, though.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (20:51):
Yeah. Well, that’s great. Thank you. That’s very helpful. And Shiran, this is a great time for us to make a transition here at the show. And we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question is, have you had a miss or two in your career or life and something you learned from it?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (21:18):
So the answer is yes, right? Well, kind of a miss, but I wanted to have my own startup when I was younger, right? Like 10 years before I opened this one. So is this a miss? I don’t know, because eventually, I found my place. I found this golden idea. During this 10 years, I built my knowledge and subject matter expertise in this domain, but really, I had this entrepreneurial mindset and doing my own things years before. And yeah, it would have been great to be in my second company now.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (22:16):
Right. Yeah. No, thank you for sharing. Well, let’s talk about a make or two. Flip that around, and talk about a success story maybe that you’ve had along the way.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (22:30):
So look, the story of Shield is unique here, right? We are not doing this postmortem because it’s still alive and kicking and still have a lot of success ahead of us. But we started it completely bootstrap, right? It was five years ago, for the first three and a half, three plus years of our existence, we were running completely bootstrap. In the beginning, some days you didn’t know if you were able to survive or not, right? Sometimes, we had only a month or two of salaries to be able to pay, and you need a lot of hard work and conviction of what you do, and to be super optimistic in order to continue this process.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (23:29):
But every time that you have a little bit of a downside, you are gathering with your employees and with some of your partners, you are going and speaking with customers, then you understand that you are spot on. You understand this is where you get your energy from. And looking back four years or five years, five years back, we managed to create a thriving company, a really innovative, really smart people. I’m far from it, but really smart people work for us, work with us in there. We really managed to flip, we haven’t completely done it yet, but we are starting to see the industry starting to shape according to our message and our promise to the market.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (24:33):
And I want to keep reminding, and I keep reminding to my guys all the time that eventually we are doing good. If you have companies that are trying to just get money and do shit, or companies that are trying to do good and good for humankind, we are in that part, right? We are trying to do good for a more transparent market, to protect the money of you and me, right? To protect the pension money, to have people to have a much more stabilized market that people won’t be able to take advantage, to be able to detect the bad actor, to be able to take the one that’s trying to arrest our kids and daughters in the digital sphere.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (25:23):
And I’m very proud of this. I’m very proud of what we are doing and the decision to do good, because you can do money or you can be successful as a company in all different industries. But the decision to do good and to stick to it, even when in the beginning you get a lot of “no” from investors, from customers, and “You’re too small for us to do business with,” or You are not part of the Gartner magic queue” or all sort of things. And to have your North Star and to be truthful with ourselves and with what we want to do, and eventually, to see it successful and to see it in their making, I think it’s impressive for us. It’s my biggest pride beside my kids and my family and all of that. But professionally, yeah. It’s pretty neat.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (26:22):
Oh yeah. Thank you for that explanation. It’s great. And let’s talk about a multiplier. Have you used a multiplier to grow, whether it may business or professionally, or maybe personally, as you’ve grown over the years?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (26:40):
Well, eventually, you can have all sorts of multipliers, right? Business wise, it can be via M&A, all kind of acquisitions and all kind of that. For us, multipliers are our people. Yeah. Our people, our employees, our partners, our investors, the ecosystem that we invest in. The pay it forward thing, it actually works, right? When we are doing good and when we are doing things truthfully, and with customers as well. When customers are telling us, “You’re too small.” And then, look, guys, this is our truth. And after two years, they’re coming back and saying, Well, we made a mistake choosing this one. We want to speak with you again.” Everything is there, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (27:28):
So it’s eventually in the people, people that we work with, people that we have as employees, people in our ecosystem, our competitors, some of them are people as well. We love them. We like them. We want to win against them. We usually try to win against them, but we are managing relationship with partners, we’ve invested with the entire ecosystem. It’s super important for us. And I think this is eventually creating brand, it’s creating trust between people, and it’s super important. And if I have to say what is the multiplier for me? It’s all about people.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (28:05):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the final question that we ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (28:15):
It’s a tough question, right? But I’ll say what I say to eventually everyone that I work with. At the end of the day, I’m a business, and I want to, one, have my customers super happy and proud of having Shield as a vendor, and proud to partner with us and help us develop our solution and to buy more from us, so I want that. I want my investors to be happy now and in the future, by making tons of money and to have a huge return of what they do. I want my employees to be proud of where they work and how they work and whom they work with and be very successful financially as well, right?
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (29:12):
And of course, we want to be successful. I want to see it growing. I want to see it becoming what I envision this company can be, which is a global leader in this domain, and really go find ourself into new industries and shaping this, I would say, the governance and risk management and insight of different industries. Yes. But also, eventually we would like to be financially successful. We want to be able to grow the company in a way that it will be financially visible for all of us and our employees and our investors.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (29:59):
And yeah, on the other hand, I also want to see… And again, I believe in good, so I want to see some of my employees opening their own companies and their own startups. I would like to see myself being able to contribute to that. Now, we’re in the future, right? Again, if you are in the business of doing good, eventually, things pays up.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (30:25):
Yeah. Yeah. And Shiran, before we go here, is there anything you were maybe hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to say yet? And also, I’d love for you to share how people can get a hold of you or get in touch with you if they’re interested in learning more about what you do.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (30:42):
So go to the other side, first of all, we have my LinkedIn page and you have your company page. Everyone can get me through each one of them. It’s very easy. Look, I think that your audience doesn’t need to be… My job is to always present the bad things that can happen. But they shouldn’t be worried. Eventually, it’s a matter of culture, right? So if the culture is there, we are just a tool to help you sanitize this, to monitor it, and to see that everything is still working well.
Shiran Weitzman, Shield (31:20):
But if a company is truthful, right? And they’re really in the business of doing business, but there is some bad apples from there, here, and then, it will flow up, right? And yeah, follow up. Follow us up. There is a lot of good things that we are looking for. We are growing in North America. We are looking for good people to join us, sales, pre-sales, all sorts of operational Cloud devops, Cloud ops, all sorts of people to help us serve our customers. And yeah, we are here.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (32:05):
Shiran, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is when Shiran said everything is digital, and there is a digital footprint for almost all communication that we have today, which is very different from how it was even 20 years ago, 30 years ago, where so much communication was still happening in person or written down. Takeaway number two is that he has found in all of his work and compliance work and things that he’s done with digital security, is that most people are good. 99.9% of them he said, are doing the right things and doing good things, so it’s just the few bad actors out there. Takeaway number three is really just an implementation step from Shiran, and he said, steps you could take include have a conduct policy that you have at your company. You can do a training with your staff or your team once or twice a year, just to remind them about how they should be doing, and just making sure you have some sort of policy in place.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (33:18):
And now it’s time for today’s win/win. And today’s win/win is when Shiran said that he believes in good. And I believe in good, too. And the reality is that most people you meet really are good people with good intentions. And he seeks that out. And he seeks to highlight that, despite the fact that his business is one in which he is looking for the bad and the bad actors and the people who are doing the wrong things. So I just think that’s a great reminder, just to remind you that people who are working with you, your vendors, customers, employees, your team, most of them really are trying to do good.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise (34:05):
And so, that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.