Chapter 1: What unique experiences shaped Brian Carbaugh's career path?
Shortly after I retired from CIA, I got a phone call from some colleagues back inside the U.S. intelligence community. I was asked to come in and sit down and talk with some digital and cyber leaders who were trying to solve hard problems.
And one of those problems was workforce retention, just losing people out of the socks and out of the cyber workforce that as they got experience and off they go and they end up being poached by private sector companies.
The questions that started coming at me from some teammates back inside the intelligence community were really centering around, how can we maximize the efficiency and the speed of our workforce? And the real number that was thrown down was, hey, Brian, what do you think we could do to sort of 10x the impact of our workforce? My name is Brian Carbaugh, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Andesite.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting.
Chapter 2: How did Brian transition from the CIA to the cybersecurity sector?
There's nothing on the back end. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. A company is its people. The teams help each other achieve more.
Most proud of our team.
Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain.
Chapter 3: What challenges does the cybersecurity workforce face today?
Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, mind you. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life.
You need to really want it.
It's not just about technology. All this and more on Codestory. I'm your host, Noah Labpart.
Chapter 4: How does Andesite aim to optimize cybersecurity teams?
And today, how Brian Carball is building the SOC driven by AI, empowering cybersecurity teams to remain at the helm. Today's episode is brought to you by .techdomains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect .com and found next to nothing. So I did what every founder does, settled. Here's what I wish someone had told me.
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Chapter 5: What is the MVP of Andesite and how was it developed?
This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, Slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand. So they make better plans, write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops.
If you're running Cloud Code, Cursor, or any agentic workflow, Unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at getunblocked.com slash codestory. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help.
Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data in real time before it's stored or analyzed. That means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools.
Chapter 6: What strategies does Brian use to build a diverse and effective team?
To see how it works, get a demo at mezmo.com slash codestory. That's M-E-Z-M-O dot com slash codestory. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. If you are building with AI coding tools, but your features keep breaking, you need to check out BrainGrid. It is the product management agent for AI builders.
BrainGrid turns messy ideas into clear specs, tasks, and prompts that coding agents like Cursor and Claude can actually build the right way. Ship real software, not fragile prototypes. Start free at braingrid.ai. Brian Carball has a non-standard path to being a CEO in the startup world. He was in the Marine Corps for five to six years in active duty before attending Georgetown for school.
Chapter 7: How does Andesite ensure scalability while maintaining quality?
Eventually, he joined the CIA and spent 23 years serving the country in multiple different roles and facets, primarily in paramilitary and covert operations. While he was there, he also started to see areas where the agency could innovate and got curious about how they could partner with private companies. But outside of technology, he is a father of three girls and a boy.
He enjoys working out, skiing, and riding on road bikes. He used to do triathlons in the past, but startup life has taken up any time he could dedicate to that. Shortly after he retired from the CIA, Brian got a call from some prior folks he knew still in the industry.
He started digging into the cybersecurity world, specifically into why there was so much attrition amongst the employees themselves. He was asked the question about how he could 10X these workers and optimize these individuals using the latest tech. This is the creation story of Andeside.
Andesite is really, at our heart and soul, a data analytics company, and we're trying to use advanced data analytics to solve really hard, pernicious, long-standing problems.
Chapter 8: What advice does Brian have for aspiring entrepreneurs in the tech industry?
Our first product that we built off of what is truly sort of a platform approach is a cybersecurity product for the Security Operations Center, so for the SOCs. As you and your listeners know, the Sox, it's a complex workplace. It's fluid. It's dynamic. There's a lot of blinking red lights. There's a lot of alarms going off. It's just a very frenetic, chaotic, busy place.
It also happens to be incredibly important work, right? Noble work protecting our networks. There's awesome people who go into the cybersecurity domain. So what we looked at and what we've built, Noah, is technology.
a product that uses advanced technology, obviously we're using AI, it's at the core of what we do, as well as some really disciplined approach and creative approaches to data science and technology software development and pairing with elite cybersecurity professionals, people who've spent their careers in this space.
to bring a piece of technology really that has the human operator, that cybersecurity analyst at the center of all that we do. So we like to say, and we're proud of the fact that we have built technology to very elegantly wrap around the user, to wrap around that cybersecurity practitioner. With the goal of being, let's make your life easier. It's a stressful place. There's a ton of burnout.
There's no reinforcements on the way in terms of all of those cyber vacancies, a lot of empty seats. So we want to use technology, certainly not to replace the human, but to make the humans better, faster, stronger in making decisions to reduce risk. So again, at our center, what we do is transform and accelerate the accuracy of human cyber work to reduce the risk.
It actually started shortly after I retired from CIA. I got a phone call from some colleagues back inside the US intelligence community. I was asked to come in and sit down and talk with some digital and cyber leaders who were trying to solve hard problems. And one of those problems was workforce retention.
just losing people out of the socks and out of the cyber workforce that as they got experienced and got to that point where they're that tier two or tier three cyber operator that we know they're off they go and they end up being poached by private sector companies who can move faster and they could get their hands on the latest technology the questions that started coming at me from some teammates back inside the intelligence community were really centering around
how can we maximize the efficiency and the speed of our workforce? How do we optimize? And the real number that was thrown down was, hey, Brian, what do you think we could do to sort of 10x the impact of our workforce? And as we started looking at it and ideating on how, if we were going to build our own company to try to do this or how we would advise,
those back inside the building on how to do it, it started to center around just how fast the technology is changing, right? So if they asked that question five or six years ago, AI just wasn't there, right, to be able to move at speed and scale. But we're at a new point. We're at, I think, an inflection point infusing new technology with the right type of approach to optimize a human being.
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