In this episode of the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise, Shelli and Patrick chat about industry advancements and leadership with Deepak Kaimal, Chief Technology Officer at COMPLY. He was previously CTO at Exostar, and held that role when this episode was recorded.

Exostar, founded in 2000 by industry leaders like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, provides secure collaboration and risk management solutions to the defense and life sciences sectors. Deepak shares his journey from an engineering student in Mumbai to becoming the CTO of this pivotal player in secure technology.

We discuss Exostar's mission, the balance between secure collaboration and innovation, and trends in identity and access management. Deepak emphasizes the importance of curiosity, dealing with change, and leading teams in ways that foster a culture that balances trust, security, and innovation.

• (00:25) Meet Deepak Kaimal
• (02:49) Deepak's Early Education and Career Journey
• (07:05) The Founding and Mission of Exostar
• (10:40) Balancing Security and Innovation at Exostar
• (16:11) Trends in Identity and Access Management
• (18:17) Leadership and Technological 
• (22:35) The Excitement of New Tech Advancements
• (29:13 Final Thoughts and Advice for Leaders

Deepak Kaimal is currently the Chief Technology Officer at COMPLY, a compliance solution provider for global financial services firms. Previously, at Exostar, he oversaw the design, development, operations and evolution of The Exostar Platform. Prior to Exostar, Deepak served as CTO at ArrowStream and VP of Engineering at Flexera. Earlier in his career, Deepak held roles at Cars.com, JPMorgan Chase, Rolls-Royce, Capgemini, and Intiqua International.  He earned a degree in Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.

Shelli:

Hello fellow innovators. This is Shelli Nelson.

Patrick:

And this is Patrick Emmons.

Shelli:

Welcome to the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise podcast, where we interview successful visionaries and leaders and give you insight into how they drive and support innovation within their organizations.

Patrick:

Deepak Kamal is joining us as a visionary leader with a strong background in building and scaling high performance technology teams and platforms. He has led global engineering teams to build out and transform large B2B and B2C SaaS businesses. He has over 25 years of experience in technology transformation through architecture, engineering, and product development.

Previously he was the former CTO at Exostar and Aerostream. He's also held Vice President of Engineering roles at Flexera and Cars.com. Deepak also has experience in senior technology positions at other equally impressive organizations, such as JP Morgan Chase, Rolls Royce, Capgemini, and Radius Digital Technologies.

He graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Mumbai and studied at the Atomic Energy Central School. Both of which laid the foundation for his impressive career in technology. In today's episode, we'll delve into Deepak's journey, the innovative work he has done throughout his career and his insights into the future of innovation.

So without further ado, let's welcome Deepak Kaimal to the show.

Shelli:

Welcome to the show, Deepak.

Deepak:

Thank you. Thank you Patrick and Shelli. Thank you for having me on the show.

Shelli:

If you don't mind, can you please share with our listeners a bit more about your role at Exostar?

Deepak:

For sure. At Exostar as Chief Technology Officer, I lead up our product development function. So I'm responsible for our product management team, for our engineering team, for our QA team and our technical operations team. So as a B2B SaaS business, all the functions that are responsible for building the products that we sell to our customer are reporting to me. It's a very exciting role and I'm very honored to be able to lead a team of technologists who are really making a difference in how our customers operate in critical industries. So highly regulated industries, aerospace and defense, where they ensure the safety of our citizens and our soldiers in life sciences where they ensure the health of people around the globe and in healthcare. So very excited to be in this role here.

Patrick:

It sounds exciting, and your background is equally as exciting and interesting. Anything that involves the word atomic as a school is something that I think is always going to draw attention. So let's start there. Let's start by diving into your journey. You've had a fascinating career trajectory from earning an engineering degree in Mumbai to where you're now the CTO at Exostar. Can you share a little bit about your early education, the steps in your career that shaped your approach and how that's led to your focus on building the future innovation and technology?

Deepak:

Sure, sure. So I grew up in the eighties and early nineties, like many of us of that Gen X generation through a lot of changing times. My father used to be a nuclear physicist, and that's how I ended up in a school that's called the Atomic Energy Central School. And I went to school with children of my father's colleagues. So a lot of children of scientists and engineers who are doing and still are doing nuclear research in a singular campus there. So it was very exciting time as the '80s were, again, a time of great change all over the globe and growing up in Mumbai, India, it was a time of change for us too. I think I was probably about 13 years old in eighth grade when I saw the first computers being installed in our school. And we would walk the hallways and we would wonder what is this thing?

Patrick:

You did waive a key component. Those weren't small books.

Deepak:

No, they weren't. They weren't.

Patrick:

So even if you had the book, you had to have the physical capability to carry said book to said lab to do said work, right?

Deepak:

That's right. First you had to get the book.

Patrick:

That's right.

Deepak:

And then you had to carry it, and then you needed to know where to look because there was no search in the book.

Patrick:

It's such a crazy concept. How did we survive?

Deepak:

Yes, exactly.

Shelli:

I don't know.

Deepak:

I've been telling my kids about indexes in books, how you have keywords.

Patrick:

What is that?

Deepak:

It's very difficult for them to appreciate the value of a good index in a book. So it was definitely exciting from that perspective. And when I graduated in '97, we were all worried about the Y2K problem because everything was going to die in another three years.

And a lot of my classmates got jobs fixing the problem because being in India, that was seen as a low cost way to address what is a global oncoming catastrophe. Today we like to joke about it that, oh wow, it was nothing. But I almost feel like we did a lot of great work to make it nothing. But anyway, I didn't get a job doing Y2K stuff. I got a job building what was called websites at that time, and in the next three years, it just grew like crazy. I was very fortunate to have been part of a small group of people from 10 or 15 with two or three engineers, the rest designers, but we got lifted by the tide that rose in those two to three years. So that's how I started off my career. Very exciting times, times of change, figuring things out on the fly.

It is very exciting being in your early twenties and not knowing what you cannot do. So you try to do it anyway, and then you figure out really cool solutions to problems that no one ever thought about. So yeah, very, very interesting start to my career there.

Patrick:

That's awesome.

Shelli:

Deepak:

So the company was formed with that view. It was one of the earliest, what we today call SaaS businesses, B2B SaaS business. I don't think at that point anybody thought of it as a cloud-based business, as a SaaS business. Those terms evolved almost a decade after Exostar was founded, but it was founded in that manner as a shared multi-tenant SaaS cloud platform.

Patrick:

Very cool. Yeah, it's funny how the whole cloud, it's still a computer somewhere, right?

Deepak:

Yes.

Patrick:

You don't have to use public cloud for it to be a SaaS solution because most of it wasn't when it first started out, right?

Deepak:

Exactly. Everybody ended up needing the expertise to manage computers to be able to succeed in their business, which probably had nothing to do with computers. You're selling shoes or you're selling tomatoes, but now you need people managing computers to be able to be successful as your businesses become digital and you competed with others who had that digital prowess there. So the cloud makes it easy because it's, as you rightly said, somebody else's computer, somebody else manages it. So I don't need to know anything about the computer and about managing it and about upgrading it or any of those kinds of things. I can focus on what I do best, which is selling shoes or selling tomatoes or whatever it is that I do well. So it has been fascinating because when you look at it from a technologist perspective, you're like, well, it's the same thing. It's a computer in a different place, but when you look at it from the perspective of a business, it's just a distraction that they don't have to deal with anymore.

Patrick:

Totally. Right. And you get to be hyper-focused on serving that whole, I think it's the hedgehog principle. What's the one thing I have to be great at? And running servers and running Outlook and running all those other things. That doesn't mean it doesn't help to know that the reason your website's not performing is because there's a hard drive somewhere that's underperforming.

Deepak:

That's true.

Patrick:

It does help to understand that there is a physical asset underneath, 'cause I mean, we're not going to get into it on the podcast, but I mean we've all been there of understanding it as architecture. So it's a good pivot. Since the environment that you work in, it really has a lot of sensitive data, how do you balance, how does Exostar balance that need for secure collaboration with the fast-paced demands of innovation while serving these very sensitive sectors?

Deepak:

It's a tough rope to walk. So we are in an industry that is in the center of attention for bad actors. We carry information that by the nature of it can be disastrous if it is compromised. And also we are bound by a number of compliance regimes, which require us to be very diligent in how we acquire store and process that information.

But we also operate in a very fast moving tech landscape where we need to change with the technology trends and to be able to offer new capabilities and functionalities to the customer. So a lot of what we do is to try and make as much of it automated as possible to the point where the human decision factor is limited. So you ensure security of the platforms by automating all the ingress and egress and all the ways in which the data can be compromised. So the less attention we need to focus there, the more we are convinced that the systems and applications are secure, the more we can focus on how do we drive innovation and how do we take new decisions and new ideas to market. But of course, it's always going to be that when you focus on a secure system, your pace of innovation is by definition going to be slower.

So how do you compensate for that is one of the interesting challenges that we balance as a business at Exostar because the security is ingrained in us. Our tagline is We Build Trust. Our customers have trusted us for the last 25 years, and that is something that we take very seriously. So how do we manage to drive innovation and provide more value to the customers while at the same time ensuring the security and integrity of our platform? So it's a very interesting challenge that we have done a good job of managing over the last several years.

Patrick:

What do you think is the key, how have you done it successfully? I'm not looking for trade secrets, obviously, but is it discipline? Is it culture? Do you set an attitude, 'cause I got to imagine the gravity of if you're building something that's that secure, if you're building a pacemaker, you got to work a certain way? You're building a website that sells tomatoes you can be a little loose on the security, right? But from my experience, it really comes down to building that culture of understanding the gravity. Is that part of it or is there other parts of it that you think are critical to creating that speed and security?

Deepak:

It is. So if you look at it as a triangle of technology process and people, so you start from the technology, there are standard practices that you put in place. Then you've got the process where you've got compliance regimes, you've got audits, you've got checks, you've got approval gates, all of those. But when it comes down to the people is where it becomes key because you could have the technology, you could have the process, but if you don't have the people respecting it, implementing it and having the passion for it, then the rest of it becomes much tougher to manage.

So on the people perspective, we ingrain in the organization the seriousness of the systems and the applications. Apart from typical things around security trainings and formulaic stuff like secure coding practices, all of those, we also get them exposed to the customers. We talk internally about the kind of things that our customers are doing so that at the individual level they have an appreciation for the responsibility that they have signed on for. The cultural component of it is I think the toughest and the most difficult one. The rest of it is something that you could pick it off the shelf from a technology and process perspective and the people part of it is, I think people and the culture part of it is very, very critical. And it's not easy to build. It takes years to acquire and to get that mindset that says that, okay, there are no compromises that you're going to be making on the security side of things.

Patrick:

Very cool. I do think that's on the cloud side. Back when we were young, the price of certain technology was a competitive advantage, but now you buy by the minute you can. I just remember trying to buy an Oracle server in '97, '98 was a no-go. You can't afford it. It's 50 grand right at the beginning. So did we go with SQL server a lot? Yes. Or even Postgres way back in the day. But nowadays, to the point of everybody is aware of what the process is, everybody has access to the technology, and then yet there's still that missing component of are you approaching it from the people standpoint? Are they doing the things that everybody knows you should be doing, but they're not really doing it? And it sounds like you've figured that out and you found the people that you know need to make that happen.

Deepak:

There is the people part of it, and then you have the guardrails part of it too. So slip or when they miss something, do you have the systems and the structure and the processes to be able to catch it? So I think once you have that in place, it just becomes a very reinforcing kind of experience for the people who work there. So yeah.

Patrick:

That's awesome.

Shelli:

And Deepak, if we could switch over and talk a little bit about identity and access management or IAM. We know it's a critical part of modern digital infrastructure, especially in life sciences, but what trends are you seeing and how is Exostar positioning itself for those future challenges?

Deepak:

So the aspect of identity and access management that Exostar deals with is a unique part of the larger ecosystem. We deal with identity and access management in highly regulated industries. So what that means is that other than just usernames and passwords, we deal with verifying that the person in real life is who they say they are. And that includes background checks and proofing and videos and stuff like that that we do for the real life person for real life tests. But when it comes to trends, what we are seeing is things like passwordless. So using hardware devices for authentication, using your phone and your face for authentication, using your biometrics for authentication. I think that's going to be very, very powerful. We see that taking off in multiple areas.

We have got in areas that are beyond digital security, that is also in, like airport security, for example, you see a lot of these kind of trends taking off, and I think that's going to be very powerful as we go forward. The question is how do we ensure trust in those systems and how do we ensure the integrity of it through the chain to be able to rely on it for highly secure use cases? So there are very interesting trends there. We operate in a very specific segment of that where we deal with the nuances and the specialization that is needed in the industries that we operate in. That's specifically aerospace and defense, life sciences and healthcare. We have the special source that goes a lot deeper into those domains. And what we are looking to do is to be able to take the typical commercial implementations and then bring those into those industries in a way that is highly trusted and secure.

Patrick:

So I'm curious, we talked about culture, talked about the innovation. What are some of the qualities, talk about leadership for a minute and innovation, what are some of the key qualities you believe are necessary as a leader in such a tech forward company for driving innovation? You talked about the types of folks, process, that triangle, which makes perfect sense. Is there anything that when you're looking at people you're developing as leaders or what you think you need to work on as a leader, what are some of those qualities that you believe are necessary for success in such a, like you said, it's a tight rope? So what does that look like when you think about this is what I'm looking for out of the leaders of my future team?

Deepak:

So two of the things that are very interesting to me and something that I've consistently seen in leaders who have worked with me and leaders who I've seen grow significantly. The two of the things, one is curiosity, that wonder why does something work the way it is or how did somebody else solve this? Then to be able to map that and look across industries and use cases and figure out how do these things apply in my case? And it also comes down to your own business. Why does my business work this way? Why can't it work some other way? Or what's the history behind that? So that level of curiosity and the ability to go out and ask and learn, that is extremely critical in leaders, in my opinion.

So now as we go into, for example, the AI world, you're not going to go into the market and hire AI engineers. There are a few of them. They're very valuable, they're focused in certain organizations. What you need are people who understand the business, who understand how technology works, and to be able to explore and map how these technologies can be leveraged to drive your own business. And the ones who managed to do that successfully are the ones who are going to see the maximum career growth as they navigate that. I think those are the two qualities that I see across the board, whether it is individual contributors or leaders that's going to be very, very critical to their own growth and success.

And driving out of this, there are things that come like learning and being able to absorb new things and being able to mentor others and coach others. But I see those as derivatives of these two core qualities. One is a curiosity around how things work and why things work the way they do. And the second is to be able to navigate change, sometimes almost ride the wave, almost look for those opportunities where change is driving growth.

Patrick:

I got a thirteen-year-old boy at the Atomic Central School in Mumbai who just got an Apple IIe and can't wait to figure out how to do basic.

Deepak:

It was definitely very, very exciting.

Patrick:

Isn't it?

Deepak:

Yeah, every one of those transitions has been extremely exciting for me personally as I've navigated my career. So yeah, absolutely.

Patrick:

Does it still get you jazzed, the new, right, let's go learn some new stuff, let's go see what's now possible.

Deepak:

Absolutely. Absolutely. 10 years back, 15 years back, it was smartphones and being able to carry your web application and your information with you when you went somewhere. So that was super exciting to be able to play with it and build that out. And today, I don't know, how long has it been, a year and a half, two years since ChatGPT? And to be able to see everything that it's opened up, just the opportunities in GenAI and in use cases that you never even imagined possible. So to be able to map that back to businesses, it is not so much about saying, okay, where can I use GenAI in my business, which is the wrong question to ask.

Patrick:

Absolutely.

Deepak:

The question to ask is, what is a problem in my business that I couldn't solve before? And the solution doesn't have to be GenAI, but in many cases there are unsolvable problems, like simple things like data cleansing, data mapping, stuff like that where you now can do it extremely reliably and extremely rapidly, and at the level of quality that is just amazing. So to be able to ask that question has been very exciting. So that's what we are playing with now, trying to answer question around simple things like developer productivity.

So how can you get developers to be able to build a lot more of reliable and secure applications at a pace much faster than what was possible before? In typical software developer lifecycle, what happens is, I don't know the numbers and the benchmark, but maybe around 10 or 15% of your time is spent on really solving the problem, doing the exciting part. The remaining 85, 90% is spent in the plumbing. How do you get the logging right? How do you get the monitoring right? How do you debug something? You put a lowercase letter where there should have been an uppercase and then you spend two days debugging that. So stuff like that.

And how do we shift that to the point where developers are spending, I don't know, 50, 60% of their time doing the things that are exciting, solving the problems? Because most of the people that we attract are the ones who love to solve puzzles and love to solve problems, and how do we make sure that they spend more of their time doing that and less of their time with the plumbing, which we can then essentially outsource to the computers to be able to do.

So, again, just one of the ways of looking at it, and I know everybody across the industry is looking at these trends and these opportunities as these are problems that we almost took for granted that, well, this is how life is, and now suddenly these are all solvable problems that we can tackle. So definitely exciting, and I've found these transition points in the industry to be the ones where you latch onto the best opportunities that you can find and then build on top of that.

Patrick:

Awesome. Yeah, I think we can have a whole podcast just on that section, that area alone on the concept of what problems. 'Cause I am with you. I think there's, when we get into the AI question, people, their first thought is automation. It's like, I don't see it, right? The level of precision that's necessary for automation, I don't think organizations, they have that level of precision. But to your point of what value added behaviors were not possible because it would've been too manual, it would've taken too much time to digest and then interpret and do something, even with just the large language models is now possible of how do we frame that? But there's still going to be a person in the middle. It's not like this is without human interaction. Not yet. But apparently OpenAI says we're thousands of days away. I just saw the quote from... "Thousands of days." That's nebulous. That doesn't mean tens of thousands. That doesn't mean hundreds of thousands. Of course, it's thousands of days away.

Unless we fall into the trap that I believe that ChatGPT is making us stupider by the day. So because we're aggregately getting stupider, asymptotically we'll never get to that generic AI because there won't be people smart enough to get us there. But that's just more of a fun concept than reality. And I got to use the word asymptotic and that makes me happy.

Deepak:

Yeah, you've been waiting for that for a long time.

Patrick:

Oh, I've deployed it more than once today.

Shelli:

Wow.

Patrick:

Yeah. No, there's another one, Antithetical. I use that one today. That was a lot of fun.

Shelli:

Been a big day, Patrick.

Patrick:

Like I said, four years of Latin. It really makes you annoying.

Deepak:

You need to refresh that vocabulary, right?

Patrick:

Exactly. Just sitting there memorizing the dictionary.

Deepak:

Yeah. So when we look at that AI space, I think how we think about it is also changing because how we think about computers, we thought about computers as very precise machines, so you needed to give it precise problems, and you always expected precise answers. Now, we are really happy that we can almost put in imprecise questions and we can type it in, but it still bothers us when the answer is imprecise. And I think that is something that we, as people will have to get used to dealing with and grappling with, is that it is almost as fallible as humans in some sense. And what that means is that it becomes a productivity enhancer, but doesn't get rid of people. So you go from, I don't know, needing 10 people to do a job before to needing only two to do it now. But I don't think it eliminates the human aspect of it just because it ends up having the fallibilities of a human.

Patrick:

Very cool.

Deepak:

But yeah, it's probably got a as good, if not a better vocabulary than you, Patrick, there.

Patrick:

All right, now we're just getting offensive. I thought we were going to be friends. I guess not. Come at me, both barrels, right? It's all I got. Right?

Deepak:

You're never going to get replaced by a computer, Patrick. Don't worry.

Patrick:

That sounds like a backhanded compliment. Yeah, "Nobody's got a program to solve your problem." The bad use of compute right there, brother.

Deepak:

That's right.

Shelli:

Well, Deepak, this has been a great conversation. Before we wrap up, is there any advice you'd like to offer to leaders kind of navigating the complexities of technology in security today?

Deepak:

What I would say is to be able to be focused, to be able to get your people focused and to have the right mindset around developing the people, growing the people, encouraging the people to engage with change, to be able to be the change leader and almost to agitate for doing the idealistic thing. I think sometimes as leaders, as we grow through our career, we become more and more pragmatic to the point where we make trade-offs in our minds way before we need to. So having that idealistic aspiration for where we want to go, to be able to hold onto that, to be able to nurture that in your people, I think is very, very critical in building a long-term sustainable organization or even growing the people that you can really be proud of.

Patrick:

That's awesome. Hearing that makes me trust that the people who work for you are very lucky if that's how you approach things and that's the way that you lead, that must be very inspiring to have a boss that's willing to let them take chances and be idealistic, as opposed to, it's very easy to be the opposite nowadays. So Deepak, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Shelli:

Yes.

Patrick:

Really appreciate you sharing your background, your experience, your perspective. It's a blessing. Thank you.

Shelli:

Thank you.

Deepak:

Thank you for having me Patrick. And Shelli was a pleasure talking to you guys. I needed the chuckles, so thank you for the laugh.

Patrick:

Awesome. Well, we also want to thank our listeners. We appreciate everyone joining us.

Shelli:

And if you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, you can subscribe by visiting our website at Dragonspears.com/podcast or find us on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Patrick:

This episode was sponsored by DragonSpears and produced by Dante32.