Marie Prokopets, Nira COO on Pivoting Search to Security

Michael Koenig: Between Two COOs is a podcast where phenomenal Chief Operating Officers from all sorts of companies come to share their insights, advice, and crazy stories. Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and I'm excited to welcome our guest, Marie Prokopets, COO of Neera. A software as a service used by enterprise IT teams to protect company documents from unauthorized access. Welcome, Marie. Thanks for being here.

Marie Prokopets: Hey, Michael. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Michael Koenig: Did I do Nira justice?

Marie Prokopets: You absolutely did. Yeah, that's exactly what we do.

Michael Koenig: Perfect.

Marie Prokopets: Perfect.

Michael Koenig: Well, we'll definitely get there. I want to hear more about it, but you've had quite the career from strategy at PwC to Diageo and then into software. I mean, you've been a part of $26 billion worth of M&A and now you've built 4 software products and oh, and you write comedy on the side, right? So with all this going on, how did you end up as COO? What was, what was your path?

Marie Prokopets: Yeah. So my path has definitely been winding. I started out, I got a business undergrad because my parents really wanted me to study business. They're immigrants from Russia. They came over in the '70s. And yeah, for them, like, business was the way to go. They even told me, you can be a computer scientist or you can be working at a company just doing something related to business. And so I tried that out in my undergrad and I was like, I really don't like this. Back then, I just, it just, yeah, I just wasn't that excited about it. And it's probably probably that rebellious part of me that just didn't want to do what my parents said to do. And, um, so then I ended up getting a master's in English Lit, which is like so far off from, you know, business undergrad.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, no, totally, totally.

Marie Prokopets: Philosophy.

Michael Koenig: Okay, philosophy. I went through the same thing.

Marie Prokopets: I get it. Yeah, so you get it. So yes, you don't have to follow a certain path education-wise to be a COO. And then from there, I kind of I wanted to get a job right out of grad school. I realized that journalism like just doesn't pay much at all. That was what I was thinking of back then. It was like $21,000 a year was the starting salary, which like nobody can live in New York City where you have to be to, you know, on that salary back then. So yeah, I ended up kind of finding my way into business writing and very quickly thereafter I got sucked into, started out at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Went from marketing into the strategy and M&A consulting practice, worked on some really, really awesome deals, really learned a ton, did not touch tech back then, so I didn't get scared away. It was all like mostly retail, consumer, automotive, and a few other industries. And then ended up over at Diageo doing strategy as well, a bit of M&A, and then got into product development. Which was actually called Innovation at Diageo and really loved building products. Like, that was my first foray into building something. Back then it was like a physical good, and I loved that, and I loved all the different aspects, and I was super into all the risks there could be and mitigating the risks, all that really nerdy stuff. And there's a lot that can go wrong, you know, when you're building something people consume. And then, you know, at a certain point in my career at Diageo, I was there for like 5 and a half years, I decided I wanted to go off and do something on my own. I didn't quite know what. At that point, I was living in San Francisco and I just kind of got sucked into the startup scene because you inevitably meet people in startups when you're in San Francisco and met my co-founder, well, now co-founder. And it's just, yeah, it's just history since then. So that was about 5 and a half years ago. Left my kind of stable, steady job and yeah, ended up doing what I'm doing now, which is, you know, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Mira, and every day is different and just constantly learning.

Michael Koenig: So how did you end up— because as a business person, you could have gone into the CEO role, you could have gone into the COO role. How did you end up in the COO position? What was it about it?

Marie Prokopets: Yeah, it's really funny. When I was much younger, so earlier in my career, People used to always tell me or say to each other and then tell me about it, like, I can see Marie being a COO of a public company. And I always thought like, why? I didn't even know what a COO was. I was like, why do they think that? I don't really understand. And I still am still figuring that part out, but, and hopefully public at some point. But, you know, for me really, I do love the kind of like nuts and bolts of making the organization work, scaling an organization. I do really, I'm more kind of risk-minded and thorough, and I don't like to make just like, uh, random quick decisions. Not to say that I move slowly, but I like to be pretty thoughtful. I'm also slightly more risk-averse, I'd say, than the average startup CEO. So for me, the COO role was just kind of natural and people could see that before, before I did.

Michael Koenig: That's great. And you found a great CEO that that was a good fit for. You kind of balance each other out.

Marie Prokopets: Yeah, we really do. I mean, we didn't have titles for our jobs for the longest time. That's something that kind of comes when you've raised money and you just have to make up who's doing what, and then especially who owns raising money. Yeah, I think that's another thing. Like, I don't love— at least today, I don't love going out in the spotlight. Like, I'm not the person that wants to go and do a talk in front of, you know, 500 people I used to be afraid of podcasts. That was like a couple of years ago. I'm okay now, but I'm, I'm less the person that wants to go run around and do fundraising and things like that. And I'm more the person that wants to focus on like, how do you get things going in the business?

Michael Koenig: As a COO now, what surprised you about the role? What didn't you expect?

Marie Prokopets: Huh? Well, for us, and we're probably not traditional in terms of how we've structured things, we've put a lot of the customer-facing parts of the business under the COO. So, I own marketing, which includes go-to-market, sales, and then all the kind of customer-facing, customer success, eventually customer support too. And I didn't expect that. I thought as a COO, maybe I'd have fewer reports or like maybe I'd be focused on, let's say, legal and HR. I didn't quite expect to have so much customer-facing stuff that I was also responsible for. So that was a huge surprise. And I do think that it works really well because we almost even consider for our company, you know, we're a security product, we're building, you know, the tool that we're building and have is for IT and security folks primarily. And then also, you know, some secondary customers like legal and compliance. But yeah, it makes a lot of sense. We basically split the org between engineering and non-engineering. And so I end up managing a lot of the kind of non-engineering parts of it, as well as obviously collaborating a bunch with engineering. And then, you know, there's the other surprises that happen, which are the daily things are going off the rails. How do you fix it? I had a big one of those this morning that started at like, I think 8:00 AM or something. And so you're just constantly kind of surprised by those daily, oh crap, there's this thing I have to fix. Yeah. And I'm sure you're used to that too. I mean, when we were chatting earlier, before we started recording, you said something like this podcast is going to help you kind of wind down after all the craziness of being a COO. And so, yeah, there's just the daily, the daily things that you're constantly dealing with. And I think a COO's role also is a bit different for a startup than a larger company because you have to kind of balance risk and being risk averse. And being super thorough with, okay, we don't have much time to move. Every day is like a huge deal. And obviously startups don't have infinite cash in the beginning, of course, either. So you're, you're basically fighting against the clock in so many different ways. And so that's something that I think as a COO, you have to be really flexible on. And yeah, I think that is surprising. Like you wouldn't think COOs are really that flexible necessarily. And, but you've gotta, you've gotta have that muscle.

Michael Koenig: Absolutely. And especially going into the go-to-market side of the business, was that something that you'd had a lot of experience with?

Marie Prokopets: I've done a lot of things, like in many roles at the couple companies I've worked at, and sales and customer success, I had never touched anything related to those. I had done some like selling materials that I, you know, worked on. So, and definitely a bunch of marketing stuff. But yeah, this is a new adventure for me, for sure. And, you know, there's a lot of rigor that we can add to it from an operational standpoint, dashboarding, uh, what are the, basically what are the goals and outcomes? And that's what I keep pushing on constantly. Like every single day is what, what's the outcome of this meeting? What are the, what's the goal that we want to get to? Then of course, measuring ourselves against those goals. So The nice thing about sales is you can kind of systematize it and even customer success as well.

Michael Koenig: So in terms of getting acclimated to the go-to-market side, what are some resources that you found helpful?

Marie Prokopets: I don't personally love reading a lot of the business books. I don't know if it's like that rebellious side of me from college when I was like, oh, I don't like business school. I don't know if that's what's coming out yet. It might be. I learn experientially by doing. And so for the go-to-market side, I mean, I didn't know how to do any of this stuff in software. I basically just try it. You know, you try methodology, you, you kind of guess how to do it and you do it. And I'm obviously lucky to have folks that I'm surrounded by who have tons of experience. So there's never a question I won't ask. I think that's another thing that really helps is Always ask questions. If you don't understand something, don't be shy or embarrassed. For me, on the go-to-market side, I really learn a ton from our customers. We have really brilliant advisors too, that I'm, you know, talking to about even like marketing ideas, go-to-market strategies, sales, things that we're working on. Like those are brilliant resources for us. And it's different than just reading it in a book. Because these are folks who have grown companies or had specific roles like they were CIOs or running sales. And yeah, that's the— for me, that's the best resource.

Michael Koenig: We'll be right back. This week's episode of Between Two CIOs is brought to you by Running Remote, the world's premier remote work conference on building remote teams and businesses. Now in its fifth year, Running Remote is curated to teach you the secret strategies and tactics you can use the very next day to manage and grow your remote team. Incredible executives from companies like Cisco,

Marie Prokopets: Yeah, I'll share one that's related to something that our product helps with that just came to mind first. I was working with one vendor of ours that had access to a bunch of confidential information and they work with a different vendor as well. So, so there's now a second, third party and they're not the most sophisticated vendor when it comes to like Google Shared Drives. And also neither is anyone necessarily. It's like, it can be really confusing. It's part of why Near exists. And so Vendor A, we'll call them, basically created a folder but they just did it by copying Vendor B's folder structure that they had for like different clients. And it just so happened that literally every single person at Vendor B was added to this folder. It was like an all at that company account. Yeah. And so me, I'm like I said, I'm risk averse. I'm suddenly looking at this and I'm like, okay, wait, you know, how is it that Vendor B even has access to this stuff? And then why does Vendor B have every single person at their company? And it was even worse. It was like they could search for the stuff. And this is things like board notes and all sorts of stuff that you just don't want out there. Yeah. So that was a crap moment where I had to kind of scramble. I had another one of those moments today where it's another Vendor A and B kind of thing. Vendor A recommended a different vendor to work with on something. And so cool, we trust Vendor A. Vendor B was really bad and didn't align with like best practices from Vendor A that we already trust and some software that Vendor A provides. And then I told Vendor A like, hey, just so you know that they don't align, like you shouldn't recommend these folks. And there's some other issues. And Vendor A told Vendor B all this stuff. Vendor B emails me and is like, hey, I heard you have a problem with us. And so I'm like, oh God. And this is like multiple hours of work that was about to go to waste. Things resolved themselves, but it was over the course of a day and tons of scrambling and trying to kind of manage all these relationships and being willing to walk away from people too. Like I was willing to walk away from both of the vendors. I'm trying to think of stuff that's, that's more of an, oh crap. I don't know.

Michael Koenig: Sharing, sharing everything from vendor A to vendor B. That's, That's a pretty big oh crap. So, and that's like a screaming advertisement too for why what you're building exists.

Marie Prokopets: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Koenig: And what took you guys down that path? What took you and Heaton and the rest of your team down the path?

Marie Prokopets: Yeah, so we actually started out as an enterprise search tool. It was called FYI and it would allow employees to basically connect to all of the different collaboration apps they were using. We supported like 24 different apps. Like Gmail and Google Workspace and Slack and Microsoft Office, all those types of things. And then they could search across the apps and find documents they needed. And we were really focused on solving that problem. It is still to this, this day, a big problem for folks. But we kind of learned this additional use case one day where Heaton and I were onboarding a new customer to the tool in person in San Francisco. This was years back, and he kind of, you know, he got into our tool and he was like, "What did you guys do?" He started freaking out. He's the CEO of like a 50-person startup. And we were like, "What do you mean? What's wrong?" And so in our collaboration app, it basically on the right sidebar, it shows every single person who has access to documents. And he's like, "You shared the documents with all these people who shouldn't have access." And of course we didn't. So we told him, okay, click on the people that you're concerned about. And he did. And he's like, oh God, you know, this person was a contractor. They haven't worked with us in years. They have access to all these confidential documents that are being changed all the time. This person, like, this is their personal email. They're an employee. I don't know why they have access on here. This person we fired. It's like a really bad situation and they still have access to a bunch of stuff. And so he was freaking out. They were about to do another round. Like, he wanted to just have everything buttoned up for that fundraising process. So this guy was up until 3:00 AM using our tool, basically clicking on the documents specifically that these people had access to and removing them. And that was easier than how Google did it, but it was still so laborious because he had to do it, you know, individual document, individual person at a time. So that's the first time he and I thought, Okay, wow, like there's something here. This is a problem. And then what we started doing after that was essentially talking to IT people, because this is what IT people do. They own this. You can look in their job descriptions, and a lot of them, it actually says, you know, they have to administer Google Workspace or OneDrive and, you know, control access on documents. And the more IT people we talked to, the more we realized that this is both, you know, a huge problem and also nobody solved it. And something as simple, like it's a simple question, right? Like, who has access to your company documents? And folks can't answer it. And so, so that was when we just started building the tool. And the more IT people we talked to, the more we realized, like, we should not be focused on the enterprise search side of things. Like, we just need to put all of our efforts towards you know, the new security product. And we ended up really focusing on that for probably the last year and a half. We've been focused on it. We've had customers since last year, you know, sizable companies for sure, and public and pre-IPO. And then we kind of went public with the fact that we had this product and we pivoted our name. So now we're called Nira. We got a new four-letter domain, which is awesome, nira.com. That was, that was not fun. That's another surprise from an operational standpoint is buying domains and dealing with all that stuff. And yeah, that's another story. But yeah, we pivoted to be Mira and just 100% focused on protecting company documents. And, you know, we started with Google Workspace, but we'll be adding more applications soon and also expanding beyond just documents.

Michael Koenig: And so, if there are people listening right now, I guarantee that a lot of us have all experienced that where it's, oh wow, that person stopped working here 4 years ago, but none of us want to admit that we found this and we just quietly cleaned it up. And I can think of a number of times when I personally have come across this. And then it becomes even more of a problem when you start working with different law firms, say, or consultants, right? You're pulling in social media consultants and you just gotta really tighten up those access controls. So Nira makes a lot of sense. It sounds like y'all really kind of stumbled across a great solution to a problem that we all have and maybe aren't admitting it.

Marie Prokopets: Yeah, you wouldn't believe the kind of the stuff we find for customers. It's, it's pretty scary. I mean, just the hidden, the hidden things that sit there for years and persist and nobody has visibility into it. And we've had multiple customers be like, oh my God, like there could be lawsuits on this stuff. This is really scary.

Michael Koenig: You should have like a little icon that just reminds people to breathe.

Marie Prokopets: That's just, that's a good idea.

Michael Koenig: It's all going to, everything's going to be okay. Just a reminder. Everything's going to be okay. Just breathe. It's kind of like an Apple Watch, right?

Marie Prokopets: Just take a breath. I love that. Breathe today. Yeah, that is good.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, it's funny too.

Marie Prokopets: Okay. Yeah, it scares like startups all the way up. Cause it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With startups. I mean, I'm sure you've created like a lot of like, I'm creating a document on my personal account. You don't even realize. Sometimes. And then, yeah. One other thing I want to say about just the problem. It's interesting. We did a, we did a security survey, basically like employee security practices. And this blew my mind. I think it was that 32% of people said that they can literally today go and access documents from previous employers. That are like currently sitting in Google, Dropbox, or Microsoft products. Like they still have access. That blew my mind. And then like 20% were like, we didn't check. So it could be way higher. So it's, yeah, it's, it's just frightening.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, the last question for new COOs, for the veterans that are going into a new business, to their next role, what advice would you give them? To someone just walking in and trying to learn the ropes and figure out what they need to do?

Marie Prokopets: I think, you know, first of all, you want to treat every experience like a learning experience. I was talking to someone earlier today. I was just— I was interviewing a candidate and they're at really large companies and they're super operationally minded.. And they were just asking, like, at a startup or a smaller company, how do you deal with the lack of resources? How do you ask someone what to do when there's nobody there? Like, there's no real resource that knows the answer and it's on you. And so for me, it's been a big exercise in being open to just learn and make mistakes and obviously do your best to not make super egregious mistakes and, and obviously take measured risks. But I think Having that kind of learning mindset and not putting so much pressure on yourself to have the right answer immediately is really, really helpful, or else you're just going to kind of get stunned by all the things that are being thrown at you. I think also just really learning how to context switch. And for some people that comes naturally, and for some other people, they have to kind of learn to do that because as a COO, you're just going to have to deal with just all the different issues that are coming at you, all the different people in the company that you need to work with, all the different initiatives. You just have to be able to go from one thing and then like shut that right off once you're done with it and then move on to the next thing that you have to tackle. I don't know if you ever deal with that, but that's one that I'm just like constantly context switching all day long.

Michael Koenig: Absolutely. That's what it's about. Sometimes you feel like you're playing whack-a-mole. Do you have any secret tips for context switching?

Marie Prokopets: I think just not getting hung up on, like, basically you have to let something go. You can't get hung up and keep thinking about something. Like you can't be in one conversation with somebody and then like have your next meeting and continuous, continue thinking about the last thing. I take a lot of notes. Actually, that is one of my, I wouldn't say it's just for COOs, but that's like one of my hidden really, I guess, talents or superpowers. I take like crazy organized notes, and so then anytime that this thing comes up again, I can just like look in the notes and then I can give exactly what happened. No, uh, sometimes I'm like— I mean, you can see me on the video, but like I've got a million of these lying around, so I have a million of the kind of handwritten notes, but For me, I just type a lot. So during meetings, I'm usually just like feverishly typing. And that helps me both process information as well as again, be able to come back to it and context switch because I'm not worried about keeping all of that information straight. Like it's, it's just there if I need it.

Michael Koenig: Right. Well, there you have it. That's great advice. So figure out how to context switch everyone. Don't make decisions quickly.

Marie Prokopets: Let things marinate. And make them quickly. And make them quickly.

Michael Koenig: Don't, listen, don't make them quickly, but make them quickly.

Marie Prokopets: Oh, exactly. That's the, that's what you have to do.

Michael Koenig: And that'll be, that'll be the, the title of this episode. Well, there you have it. So nira.com, is that where people should go to check it out?

Marie Prokopets: Yeah, absolutely. nira.com. You can obviously find me or my co-founder on Twitter, Marie at Or Marie Prokopets is the name. And then my co-founder, he's HN Shah, S-H-A-H, his Twitter. He's got more followers than me, but quite a few.

Michael Koenig: Quite a few. Well, listen, everyone, go check out Nira. And when you find out all of the random people that have access to your documents, just remember, it's going to be okay.

Marie Prokopets: Breathe. Breathe.

Michael Koenig: It's going to be okay.

Marie Prokopets: Breathe.