GISGID EP 28 – Infinavate Founder Maurice Hamilton and Den Jones

Speaker 1:
Hello and welcome to Get It Started, Get It Done, the Banyan Security Podcast covering the security industry and beyond. In this episode, our host and Banyan’s Chief Security Officer Den Jones speaks with Maurice Hamilton, the founder of Infinavate, an IT support and managed services provider that’s mastered top quality and reliable service for its customers. We hope you enjoyed Den’s discussion with Maurice Hamilton.

Den Jones:
Hey folks. Hey, welcome to another episode of Get It Started, Get It Done. I’m your host, Den Jones. This is Banyan’s cutting adventure into podcasting. We also do some software thing as well, so we can dig into that another day. So every episode I get some fascinating and exciting guests. Today is Maurice Hamilton. I’ll let Maurice introduce himself, but he is a founder, he is a CEO, he’s a smart man, he’s the man with the plan. Maurice, welcome.

Maurice Hamilton:
Den, thanks for having me., I really appreciate it.

Den Jones:
So why don’t you start by explaining a little bit about who Infinavate is… How do you even pronounce it? Come on man, you keep us right here.

Maurice Hamilton:
Sure. So actually Den was right, I am the founder and the managing partner at Infinavate. And Infinavate is actually two words I put together, the first part, infinite for Infin, and innovation, avate. So they got together, got married and they created Infinavate. So that’s how we created that name. So I thought I’d be a little bit of creative with it.
Just to give you a little bit of my background, I am a software engineer developer by trade. I started off programming COBOL, Assembly JCL, and working on mainframes way back in the day when we had punch cards. So that’s how I started my career in computer science and computer industry and I’ve been doing it for many, many years thereafter. Had a couple of big stints with three main companies out there, two of them are VAR resellers, they’re both multi-billion dollar companies that when I started out they were a few million-dollar companies so I had a chance to watch those companies grow as the PC came from a price of $5,000 down to an affordable, now you can pick them up for a couple hundred bucks. Back in those days we had fax machines and we had modems and we thought a 1200 bond modem was the bomb.com back in those days.
So I’ve been doing that for many years now. I actually worked with distribution, which opened my eyes to working on a global perspective with engineers all around the world and about maybe almost five years ago now, I purchased my own company and we’ve been focusing on software development, focusing on cybersecurity and focus on dispatch services for our clients. So that gives you a high level overview of my career for the last three, almost four decades.

Den Jones:
Awesome. And it’s funny, so you and I have one thing in common then, I’ve also done some COBOL programming when I was a kid. Back in my college days it was actually the one class that I excelled at. I think I was shit at everything else, but COBOL for some reason, that just seemed to work for me. I don’t know if that really speaks to my twisted brain, I’m not quite sure.
So Infinavate, why don’t you share a little bit about, so what is it you guys do? What do you focus on? And when you started the company, what was top of mind for how you approached, why did you want to get involved and run your own company? So I want to hear first about what you guys do, what you excel at, and then why.

Maurice Hamilton:
Sure. So what we really do and we do very well is going to companies and actually helping them with business process optimization. So we’ll go to a organization and then the first thing I like to do, because I like solving problems, so we’ll go to an organization and say, “Okay, tell me about your pain points.” We’ll sit down with all the different stakeholders I’m talking about from warehouse staff all the way to billing department and to the IT staff and say, “Where are you having your glitches at?” And then we’ll kind of take an analytical approach to how we can actually resolve those problems with it.
When we work with some of our customers that actually have dispatch services, my goal is to go out there and see how can we do it faster and better than everybody else? So someone may call us like now and say, “Hey look, we have a access point down at this particular location. How soon can you send somebody out there?” My goal is to work with the people that we’ve built relationships over the years and see if we can actually get somebody qualified out there to resolve the problem. And at the end of the day, I’m looking for speed to market, I’m looking for someone to say, “Man, that Maurice and Infinavate and his team, they’re really jogging on the spot, they do a pretty good job and they do great quality work when we were down and so we appreciate them coming back out to solve our business problems.”
So at the end of the day, my whole thing is to actually go back out there and I feel good when I actually finish with that particular project for a client and they can come back and say, “You guys did a great job. Let’s give you some referrals out there and try to help you with your business as well.”

Den Jones:
Awesome, awesome. And so what inspired you to want to run your own company or start your company? You said something which kind of got my attention, you said, “I bought the company.” So what inspired you to get involved and become the CEO of a company?

Maurice Hamilton:
Great question, Den. I think it came back from, and I love working in Corporate America, when I worked in distribution, it was a really great job, I really enjoyed it. I don’t have all the things I have to deal with now, I have to worry about marketing, invoicing, tax, you got to do all kinds of different things when you own a company. But I enjoyed it.
I think that what really inspired me to do this was that all the relationships I’ve built up over the years, all the OEM partners I’ve worked with, I’m talking about Microsoft, Cisco, all those individuals. I said, “You know what? This is kind of like the capstone. This is like taking a culmination of all the work and all the experience I’ve done over the years and just taking all those resources and applying them and actually seeing what can I do to actually make it better for everybody else.” So that’s what it is. It’s more of, like I mentioned about the capstone, it’s me going out there and actually saying, “I want people to say my legacy will be delivering quality work,” and it’s like a motivational push to do it and actually see how much I can build the company up and see how much I can make the customers really happy with the quality of work that we do.

Den Jones:
Perfect, perfect. Now a lot of strategy work, a lot of business processes and stuff. So if we kind of jump into security and then the world of that, what do you think leaders need to think about that makes a good security strategy? What kind of guidance do you give them?

Maurice Hamilton:
I love security. I think cybersecurity is probably the most exciting part of the job, I would say when I work with leaders and say, “Hey, you know what? The first thing you need to do is actually have a framework, put some kind of framework and put policies and procedures in place. Start from the basics, start from the fundamentals, create your playbooks and then go out there and say, “Okay, this is our basic policies and procedures. Now we’re going to build a strategy on top of that,” and then actually I would say build that infrastructure so that you can actually go out there and follow up on it. Make sure that you’re checking every day for any kind of malicious spyware that’s on the systems. Go out there looking, checking your ports.”
And I say that because the hackers, the bad actors, they never stop trying to penetrate your systems, they don’t give up. And you have to be right 100% of the time, they only have to be right once. And I think that when I talk to the people I’m working with, especially when we do red, blue, and purple type teaming working together on this, I’m looking for any kind of portals, any kind of openings that they actually have. So I think that if you actually have the right hardware, you’ve got the right policies and procedures, you have a really great framework, you have people that are actually taking this seriously or your team, they’re checking for it, they’re going out to availability websites and checking to CISA, what the government agency are saying, “This is a new guidance that came out today, make sure that you’re patching your infrastructure.” And I can give you so many different examples of companies that left one vulnerable server out there and they got infiltrated and then their whole systems were brought to a halt.
So I would say that would be it. The last part of that would be training. Train your employees, go out there and not only once you do the training, go back out there and do a test two hours later to see what’s stuck and continuously train, continuously go back and apply the basic fundamentals and continue to test your new infrastructure, make sure that you’re as solid as you can be. There’s no such thing as being a 100% safe, but my advice is to be as solid as you can. Make it tough for those guys.

Den Jones:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we used to always say, if we can make it more expensive for them at our company, then maybe they’ll go and harass another company, right?

Maurice Hamilton:
I agree.

Den Jones:
So the more expensive it costs them to do it. Okay, let’s think of big AI shift now, I think the world is going AI crazy, right? Everyone, everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s concerned about it. What are you guys seeing and what are you most excited about?

Maurice Hamilton:
I’ve always been a big fan. I’m going to go back and date myself to 1984 when the first Terminator movie came out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And I always said that it can happen, it can actually happen. I love AI for the simple reason that I think that artificial intelligence, especially with machine learning, especially with the supercomputers like quantum computing when we get to that particular level, a lot of people are working on it now and we will get there very soon, I think that there are a lot of problems in the world that we can solve with AI. We can actually go back and look at healthcare, let’s be able to solve these problems with cancer. Let’s be able to, when we have another pandemic type virus come out there, use computers so we can actually not only use it for predictability, but to be able to apply some kind of resources and some kind of medicine that we can actually apply to people, give it to people that can solve those problems.
So I see AI huge, I see it with education. I can see virtual reality like with the metaverse, I see what they’re doing as far as creating those immersive experiences where people can actually put some VR goggles on and I can actually see history, I could see Abraham Lincoln making a presentation or watching a king speech or whatever it would be, and I’m going to learn more because it’s going to make it seem so real to me that it’s going to absorb better than just reading a book. So I see big changes with AI on so many different levels. I think that the things that we do now, like basic things like voting, some of the basic things that we take where we have to go back and do a manual process for it, I can see cryptography, I can see AI, I can see machine learning, blockchain. I see those as elements of the future, the very, very near future. And I think that they will become into play sometime here very soon.

Den Jones:
Yeah, absolutely. And it is funny, that’s why I wanted to kind of not go down the dark path of all these technologies because everyone always seems to focus on that, like, “What are you scared of?” It’s like, “Okay, but well, what are you excited about?” Because I think the reality with all technologies, there’s the good side of it and then there’s the abuse side of it. Even when Facebook first came out, everyone’s like, “This is brilliant,” and they couldn’t wait to get the pictures of their kids up there, right? And then 10 years later you’re like, you’ve just created a database of all the pictures of your children growing up and who they are and all the details about them, you’re enabling bad things to happen, but good intent to begin with. So I think the good side of this is brilliant and like all other technologies, AI is going to have the negative side as well, but we will prevail as we always have, I guess.

Maurice Hamilton:
100% Den, and I think about that, you’re right, there’s always the good and bad and then there’s good, bad, and then there’s evil. There’s always going to be the evil people that’s going to figure this out and say, “What could we do to harm society or harm humanity?” Our thing is actually, what’s the betterment for humanity? There’s always going to be some naysayers out there, some people that’s going to go the other direction, but we just have to make sure that we put as many practices and policies and procedures in place to try to inhibit that, to stop it when it happens so that we can curtail some of those big events from happening.

Den Jones:
The funny thing, I mean, I think all that you’re going to see with this emerging technology is the negative stuff is going to become more personalized, more complex, more targeted, more of it, and the defender side has got to use the same technologies to basically recognize those attacks are going to be evolving like that, and then how do we use them? So I just see it as being an evolution of the last 10 years or 20 years anyway of attack and defense. The cat and mouse game doesn’t stop, it just changes. I think if anything, it’s going to get faster.
So different topic. Okay, so when you’re in a social circle with people who do not know technology, how do you explain your job to those people, what do you tell them you do?

Maurice Hamilton:
That’s a very good question. I’ll go back and say if I’m making presentation to let’s say some senior citizens or some people who are really not… How can I say it? They really don’t use a computer every single day, it’s not something that they normally do. So when I go back and tell them about the technology and I look at that information, always go back and say, “Hey, look, I remember when you read the stories and history, go back and read about the horse and carriage, and people saw the automobile coming along and they said, “Wow, that’s going to ruin all the jobs and it’s going to be bad,”” I say, “No, eventually those individuals that had to were probably doing a horse and buggy became mechanics because you find something, evolution always makes us better and it takes us to a different level. When the industrial revolution happened, when Bill Gates came out and said we want every home to have a personal computer, it actually makes everything better for us.”
So I try to tell them, “Look at it in the frame of mind,” and I always use the word it’s going to be for the betterment of humanity and a betterment of mankind that we can actually use this technology to the benefit of ourselves when I can actually take a phone out and I can speak to a cell phone and actually give it commands and it actually does what I want it to do. I mean, that’s really good. It’s going to make your life simple, it’s going to make everything better. So use it for your benefit.
And then I try to give examples of say, “Hey, look, you want to know the weather outside? Pick up your iPhone and say, “Hey Siri, what’s the weather outside?”” I got to be careful so it doesn’t actually say that right now, but use it that way. Just use it to do some basic calculations, look up information in history, try and give that information to you because it can help you to be a little bit smarter, it can make you more automated, it can make you be a little bit more proactive with some of the activities that you do on a day-to-day basis.

Den Jones:
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. So in Scotland, when I was growing up, I was very actively helping people with their computers and at some point it became a bit of a drag. So I figured when I moved to California, I was going to tell people that I was a igloo repairman because I knew that in California, the likelihood of people hitting me up for doing side gigs and work on the side was going to be very low if I’m an igloo repairman because I don’t see a lot of igloos over here. So I figured that that one would be good because I was sick and tired of fixing people’s bullshit computers. I mean, calling me up all the time because they can’t get Dune working was not my thing. I’m like, “I haven’t done desktop support in 10, 15 years. I’m not going to help you with your PC.” So yeah, so an igloo repair man if you’re ever curious on how to dodge doing side gigs and things like that, then tell people that’s your gig and you’ll be fine.

Maurice Hamilton:
I like that.

Den Jones:
Yeah. So when you’re not working, what do you like to do for fun?

Maurice Hamilton:
There’s a couple things I enjoy doing. One of my hobbies that I picked up was flying small airplanes, Cessna, like the 152s, single propeller, I’d like to get to dual propeller. When the pandemic hit, it kind of put my lessons on hold and I just have been so busy with the company I haven’t had a chance to get back out there. But one thing I want to get back out there is flying the small planes, I enjoy that. There’s a different type of freedom when I’m actually up 35,000 feet up in the air and I just feel free doing that. So that’s one thing I really, really enjoy doing.
And the second thing, I like the outdoors, I love the outdoors, whether it’s some whitewater rafting, it’s actually biking, I love biking, I’m talking about 21 speed bike. That’s really, really fun. And just being outdoor., not when the weather’s like 110 degrees outside, but I’m an outdoors guy so I enjoy the outdoors and having that feeling of freedom when I’m up in the air.

Den Jones:
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s awesome, awesome. Well, I think the one thing about our industry is it’s fast-moving, it’s high pace, it’s high stress so it’s really important for everyone’s mental health to think of, how do you get downtime? How do you get to reconnect with nature or just reconnect with yourself, right? Or loved ones. So for me, it is vitally important, work-life balance, and that really is something about getting out. I want to wrap up with, if there was one piece of advice that you would give someone in their early stage of their career, what would it be?

Maurice Hamilton:
Building relationships. If I had learned many, many years ago, if you really want to go up the corporate ladder, you have to build relationships and you don’t want to burn those bridges. And I’m saying just meet as many people as you can, take down numbers and actually be friendly with these people, follow up with individuals. Because I think that one of the key lessons I learned in life is actually having key relationships and actually being able to call someone not only for advice or for favors, whatever the case would be, but at least you’re connected.
The other thing I would say that goes along with the relationship is to have coaching. I wish I had learned many years ago that the more coaching that you have with people that you consider mentors and they can actually give you advice how you can get to the next level, it is so essential. And I’ll say one more other thing with that, and I give you an analogy, when you think about sports team, there’s a coach. When you think about in music lessons or anything that you want to do in life that you typically have a coach, why not do it for your personal self, for your own personal benefit, and for business? Have a business coach and they’ll teach you how to actually go back and take your game up to another level so you can actually have sky’s the limit and have unlimited potential, unlimited capability to accomplish what you want to accomplish because you’re utilizing the relationships and then the coaching.

Den Jones:
Yeah, no, that’s excellent advice. And I think that’s one thing is relationships are key to business, relationships are actually key in life for your happiness. And if you don’t look after the relationship, then it always goes downhill. And the other thing on relationships is it’s really important to build those connections, nurture those connections before you need them. After you need them, it’s a little late. And actually I’ve got friends that I partner with in the FBI, and one of the things that they always say to people is build these relationships before the shit hits the fan because calling and meeting someone for the first time like the FBI, if they’re going to come and help your company or whatever, that’s not the first time you want to meet someone is when you’re at your worst, right? And I think there’s a lot of professions where they end up meeting people when they’re at their worst. So we are blessed in our profession that it doesn’t have to be like that. You can build relationships. So that is great advice, Maurice.
Hey, well first of all, thank you very much for your time. I know you’re an extremely busy guy, so it’s a pleasure having you on the show. I’d love to stay in touch and we should check in again at some point soon and just see how the business is going and maybe we can check in on a six-month strategy and guidance for people as we go through the year, I don’t know, we will figure that out. So Maurice, yes, thank you very much.
Everybody, this is Get It Started, Get It Done. I’m your host, Den Jones, and Maurice, thank you very much. Appreciate your time.

Maurice Hamilton:
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening. To learn more about Banyan Security and find future episodes of the podcast, please visit us at banyansecurity.io. Special thanks to Urban Punks for providing the music for this episode. You can find their track, Summer Silk, and all their music at urbanpunks.com.

 

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