Shawnee Delaney
Founder and CEO, Vaillance Group
And so when I started the company, I felt that sense of mission again. So I am now able to help organizations protect their assets, their people, their facilities and their intellectual property from malicious actors.
Summary
This week on Leadership Matters, Alan is joined by Shawnee Delaney, founder and CEO of the Vaillance Group, which consults and trains companies worldwide to defend themselves from Insider Threats. Shawnee is a cybersecurity expert, a decorated intelligence officer and licensed private investigator who has worked across the public and private sectors at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Merck and Uber.
Over the course of their conversation, Alan and Shawnee discuss her early life and upbringing, her incredible career journey, her inspiration for starting Vaillance Group and the many lessons in leadership she’s learned along the way.
Mentions & Resources
Guest Bio
Shawnee Delaney is an Insider Threat expert, cybersecurity consultant, and CEO of Vaillance Group - a bespoke insider threat consultancy and training organization. She is a decorated intelligence officer and licensed private investigator and has conducted thousands of public and private sector investigations.
Ms. Delaney spent the better part of a decade working with the Defense Intelligence Agency as a Clandestine Officer conducting human intelligence (HUMINT) operations around the world. After the DIA, she worked alongside the Department of Homeland Security where she coordinated and managed intelligence community relationships with the private sector.
Ms. Delaney consults for Fortune 500 Companies, most notably in the energy, pharma and tech sectors, as well as the public sector. Her work with these companies has helped in targeting fraud, platform abuse, data exfiltration, and attribution of unauthorized disclosures. She is credited with creating Uber’s Insider Threat program, as well as the foundational training at Merck Pharmaceuticals that helps protect Intellectual Property and Trade Secrets. Her front line experience with some of the world’s largest organizations provides the foundation for her knowledge and field-tested recommendations.
A sought-after public speaker, Ms. Delaney shares her extensive knowledge to protect clients’ assets, people, and confidential information and to educate groups about the harm that comes from both malicious and unintentional threats. She holds an M.A. in International Policy Studies with a specialization in Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Proliferation, and a M.S. in Cyber Security.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
I'm joined today by an insider threat and cyber security expert, a decorated intelligence officer and licensed private investigator who has conducted thousands of public and private sector investigations, often risking her own life to do so. Shawnee Delaney is the founder and CEO of the Vaillance Group, a bespoke insider threat consultancy and training company for some of the world's largest organizations. Prior to founding the valance group, Shawnee spent a considerable portion of her career working as a clandestine officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, conducting human intelligence operations around the globe. She's also worked at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as at companies such as Merck and Uber, where she was credited with creating Uber's Insider Threat program and foundational training at Merck Pharmaceuticals aimed at safeguarding intellectual property and trade secrets.
I am so thrilled to have her on the show today to discuss her upbringing, her early influences, her inspiring career journey and the many lessons in leadership that Shawnee has learned along the way. Welcome to leadership matters. It is such a pleasure to have you on.
Shawnee Delaney
Thank you so much, Alan. I am so happy to be here, truly. Truly, it's an honor.
Alan Fleischmann
I have been looking forward to this. Let's start by discussing your early life. You were raised in Santa Cruz, California. Tell us a little bit about your early life, what your parents did, any brothers or sisters, what life was like around the house and anything special about the place where you grew up.
Shawnee Delaney
So I grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and that whole area is magical if anyone's ever been there. It is just truly an incredible place to grow up. I grew up on, I think we had maybe 13 acres of redwood forests, and I did 4H and I had livestock, and I was kind of a nerd. No, I was kind of a nerd. I was a really big nerd. But I loved it. I loved my childhood, you know, mowing the lawn and feeding the animals and stuff like that. I had a younger sister, six years younger. My father was a plumber, and my mom worked, well, first, she was a law enforcement officer, sheriff's deputy for Santa Clara County, and then ended up working at Stanford University as a facilities manager. So I had this great big world with the exposure of everything she did at Stanford and all the incredible speakers that came to Stanford. So I started hearing about Hoover Institution and all the cool stuff there, and it kind of just opened my eyes up to international relations a lot.
Alan Fleischmann
That's so cool. Did you have any mentors along the way that kind of enlightened you, or it kind of showed you the world, because you're such a global person?
Shawnee Delaney
You know, I wouldn't say I had any mentors until I was much, much, much older, probably my 30s. But my parents traveled a lot, and my dad liked to go off the beaten path. So if tourists went to the right, we would go to the left, and that's kind of how I was raised. He traveled all over the place. He would come home from Brazil with big, huge zip lock bags full of emeralds, which, by the way, I never got any. But like he always had a business somewhere, and suddenly Czech Republic and all these different things. And so I grew up quite international. In fact, I gave my parents a bit of grief when I got older, saying, you never took me camping. You know, most American kids, they get to go camping, and they're like, oh, we're so sorry.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, that's amazing. But what was it that sparked your father to be so interested international?
Shawnee Delaney
You know, I don't know. He's just always been super international, and he's the one like, every night he would watch the news, CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, and I had that exposure because I liked being around that. And so I had watched the news with him from like, two years old. I mean, very, very little. I was just really fascinated with the World News and what's going on the world, and this big, beautiful place that, you know, I could go to. But it was hard, you know, it just picturing the globe and everything that was happening in the world, and watching it through the eyes of my father and as told through Dan Rather, it was just really, it left a big impression on me.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s so cool. So you decided you wanted to go to the University of San Diego for undergrad. Was that something you knew for a while was that? How did you choose that?
Shawnee Delaney
That's a good question. So I that was, like, my blue sky, like, if I could get into a really cool school, it would be that one. So I had applied to other schools like San Diego State, and just USD was the one that I really had my heart set on. And when I went and did like the school tours of all the schools I had applied to or were going to apply to, there was something about USD when I walked on that campus, it was actually the first time I ever felt imposter syndrome, but it punched me in the face. Like I walked around and thought, this is the most gorgeous campus I could possibly imagine. What am I doing here? And when I got accepted, I really, truly couldn't believe it. I think it was my essay. I don't think it was my grades. I think it was my essay.
Alan Fleischmann
What'd you write about?
Shawnee Delaney
I wrote about 4H and just how 4H had had shaped my life. Like I said, I was a total as a total nerd.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. Did you know you wanted to go into political science as a focus?
Shawnee Delaney
So truthfully, I picked poli sci because I only had to take one math class. The rest of all the majors that I was interested in, I had to take a lot of math, and math is not really my thing, so that's what I did. But I will say, ever since I was in, gosh, probably middle school, I used to sign people's yearbooks. I'd sign my fancy name, and then I would say, save this, because it'll be worth a lot of money one day when I'm President of the United States. So I was always interested in politics.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. So there was the and that came from your dad, rather watching too. You probably were very what was happening, yes, in the country as well. And then so your mentors. You didn't have any mentors in college probably either. Then it sounds like they came later as well. But were there people who actually, how did you get focused? I mean, I know you went to Stanford too, if I'm not mistaken for a period, right?
Shawnee Delaney
So Stanford, I worked at Stanford and actually took, I was able to take Continuing Studies classes for free there. So I literally signed up for every single class that I could and a lot of them just so I could get the books, just so I could learn. I love learning. I'm very sapiosexual, like my favorite animals are the world's smartest animals. Like everything for me is about learning and intelligence. So having that ability to do that at Stanford was incredible. I don't know. I really just was influenced it from a very young age, like I mentioned, from watching the news, watching Dan Rather with my father. We talked about world news. I remember when the Gulf War, the First Gulf War, started, and again, Dan Rather is on the TV, and my dad rushed up to the TV, you know, big, huge, old box TV, and put in a cassette tape. And he's like, I gotta record this. This is history. This is history. So moments like that just really impacted me.
Alan Fleischmann
That's very cool. And did you, obviously, I'm just, I'm trying to get the thread of where the world of intelligence became part of your thinking. But I know you went to, you went to Stanford, then you then attended Middlebury Institute of International Studies, which is in Monterey, correct?
Shawnee Delaney
Yep.
Alan Fleischmann
And then the Naval Postgraduate School there as well, right?
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah. So I studied cyber security and terrorism and intelligent operations. So in my mind, it all fits together, but probably to the outside observer, it doesn't. So when I took classes at Stanford, it was just to absorb and learn everything I could. And then I had always wanted to basically, as far as I can remember, probably four years old, I have always been fascinated with terrorism, counterterrorism, the motivations and the psychology behind why do people conduct terrorist acts? And I don't care what type of terrorism or we can talk extremism in any direction, right? It's just so fascinating to me.
And so again, Dan Rather, when the Marine Corps barracks were bombed in Beirut Lebanon, Dan Rather came on. The tone of his voice changed. My father always read the paper while he was listening to the news, and when that story came on, he really slowly put the paper down and was paying close attention to what was being said. And I remember that the really graphic images that building that was bombed out, and there was just something in my very young brain that clicked where I've always been very curious, but I just wanted to learn more. Why? Why did this happen? Who are these people? And so as I got older, I started studying terrorism, counter terrorism.
I got really fascinated with counter proliferation, so weapons of mass destruction, be it biological or nuclear radiological, et cetera. And so when I decided to pursue my master's degree, I went to Middlebury, Monterey Institute of International Studies at the time. And as I was studying, I realized that I thought that counter terrorism and counter proliferation should go together at that time. In those years, there were reports that al Qaeda was gassing dogs and that they were playing with, you know, bio weapons and chemical weapons. And so it took me two years to basically convince our dean that that could be a program, but we didn't have enough terrorism courses, and so I had to go to the Naval Postgraduate School to augment that program. And I took an international terrorism course there in order to graduate with my hybrid degree that I had started.
Alan Fleischmann
And was that, how did you find out that there were degrees like that, that you could even go for?
Shawnee Delaney
Just a lot of research. I am a big researcher.
Alan Fleischmann
Always have been. I love that. Actually, tell us, did you, you moved obviously, when you stayed in California.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, I stayed in California. So I grew up in the Bay Area, went down to San Diego for the four years of college. Loved that, San Diego is an amazing city, and then back up home and Monterey Bay was 30 minutes from my house.
Alan Fleischmann
And then you went to when did Washington come become part of your future?
Shawnee Delaney
I moved to Washington when I started, well, actually, before I started with DIA. So we had some recruiter, you know, CIA recruiters come and DIA recruiters. And I had always thought, CIA, CIA. Everyone knows CIA. Nobody knows DIA, right? And I got, actually, a job offer. Went through the whole process. I had applied multiple times, including when I was, like, 19 years old. And I will never forget the guy doing the interview was like, wait a minute, how old are you again? And when I was like, 19, sir, he's like, can you call us back in a few years?
So I had really doggedly pursued CIA, and when I got this job offer just for a Clandestine Service trainee, I was so excited. And I remember the recruiter saying, like, you need to buy a car because it snows here in DC. I'm from California. Like, I've got a coup like, you know, so I bought the car. I was ready to go, and then about two weeks before I was supposed to leave, I got a call that said they had gotten rid of that job. So that was one of the biggest punches in the gut that I think I've ever felt.
I felt completely defeated, but I remembered that when I was going through all of the assessments, there was like a week long of like psychology tests and all kinds of things like that. There was a woman that I had met in the waiting room who told me, If I don't get this, I'm going to go with DIA, because DIA is the same. It's saying it's Intel. There's case officers, right, but their mission is just a little bit different. And I thought, I've never heard of DIA, but if that's a Plan B, that'll work. And so when they got rid of that job, I was like, All right, it's DIA. And so by chance, some recruiters happened to come to the school, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and I basically just laid it all out there and told them, you know, all the reasons why they needed to hire me. And so I moved out to DC while I was going through the background process, which was probably well over a year. I mean, it's a very slow process, as many people know. And I worked at a Cheesecake Factory as a server while waiting for my clearance, very close to a building that was a DIA affiliated building
Alan Fleischmann
That's so funny. And in DC, wow. And then when did you go to Cairo and Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan?
Shawnee Delaney
So I did that because I felt like if I could really speak Arabic, I already spoke Spanish, if I could really speak Arabic, I'd be more marketable and more likely to get a job with intel. And so I studied Arabic my first year at Monterey Institute, as well as Spanish. And then my second year, the second summer, I moved to Cairo by myself, because why not? And decided I was going to study Arabic there, just immersion. And so I studied, studied all summer there and then traveled around Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, because I figured once I got my intel job, they probably wouldn't want me traveling to some of those places with my clearances, so I had to, like, sneak everything in beforehand.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s amazing. That was an amazing experience. And your Arabic was good I imagine at that point.
Shawnee Delaney
It was good. It's horrible. Now I don't think I speak it. I can sing some horrible songs now, but that's about it.
Alan Fleischmann
Let's go back to you went to work at the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. How do you actually distinguish that from CIA, so people understand the difference? And then tell us a little bit about the fact that you went to DIA after you turned down the FBI and the NSA, the National Security Agency as well.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah. So I am a person who needs many plans. I need a plan A, a plan B, a plan C, and so on. And so DIA was not my plan A, right? CIA was, but the Defense Intelligence Agency, their mission is a little bit different. Their mission is to support the war fighter, which is an incredible mission. So they get the same training as CIA down at The Farm. Everyone's heard The Farm, if you watch movies and things like that. And so the instructors are all CIA and DIA. We're all intermingled and intertwined. So it was a pretty good backup plan.
So I went DIA, but what I did again, because my plan C, Plan D, FBI and NSA. I figured if I could get my foot in the door somewhere in intelligence, I could prove my worth and then go to wherever I wanted to go, which is not exactly how it works in intel. So I got job offers from NSA, and I got job offers, a job offer from the FBI. So I went through the whole process with all of them, and ended up picking DIA because it was the closest to what I wanted. I you know, I wanted to be a spy, and that was how I was going to do it. And you knew you wanted to be a spy. I knew I wanted to be a spy. I don't know at what age it was, very, very young, whatever age it was that I learned what espionage was. It was like the heavens opened, the angels sang, and I was like, that is what I was meant to do with my life.
Alan Fleischmann
That's so cool. You had your calling.
Shawnee Delaney
I absolutely had my calling. And I can't lie, which is weird for a spy to say, I miss it every day, like I miss the mission. I miss the people, I loved that job.
Alan Fleischmann
How long were you in that job?
Shawnee Delaney
Eight and a half years.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, tell us a little bit about the about your tours. I know you served in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Correct? Where else did you serve? And tell us a little bit about what what a mission looks like.
Shawnee Delaney
So I conducted clandestine operations all over the world. I was stationed here in the United States in two different locations. I was stationed in Germany, supporting like AFRICOM requirements. So I got to travel all over Africa alone, which was, I've got some good stories there. And two war zone tours to Iraq, two war zone tours to Afghanistan. Really, really incredible times when I was in Iraq, for example, both times I was there in 06-07, and then ‘09. And if you look at a graph of the violence at those times, it was like, anytime Shawne arrived, the violence escalated. So it was really, really hairy times to be there. We were rocketed all the time. We were mortared all the time. There was a lot of stuff that I saw, but the camaraderie, I don't know how to explain. Anyone, anyone who's been there knows, but the camaraderie of people, of the military and contractors and civilians like myself, when you're all in it together. It was just something very special. And I actually just told someone the other day that my favorite holidays, my favorite holiday memories, were when I was deployed, because it was just a really special time to be there. Everyone cherish each other, being together. And then, you know, side note you get, like, notes and cards and things from elementary school kids that we'd hang all over the walls like that was that was pretty cool.
Alan Fleischmann
That's very cool. And then what? So, what did you go in? What were the deployments?
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, so Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, Afghanistan.
Alan Fleischmann
And that was really hard there too, I imagine. I mean, you weren't worried about your safety.
Shawnee Delaney
I mean, oh yeah, I was, and I think, like looking back, there's a big difference between the Shawnee today and the Shawnee then, like, I now have three children. So when I think about it, I think about it very differently. When I go on a work trip, I'm like, oh gosh, what if the plane crashes? Who's going to watch my kids? Because I'm gonna say, because I'm a single mom, back then, it didn't matter. I thought like it was glorious if something horrible was going to happen to me, which I didn't want it to, I was going to do my service. I was going to die in the line of duty. I was going to be protecting people and savings lives like it mattered to me. So I looked at things a bit differently, but I had plenty of hairy experiences that just kind of made you question a lot and really appreciate life.
Alan Fleischmann
That's so good. What did your parents think you were doing?
Shawnee Delaney
So I vaguely told them sort of a little bit what I was doing. I was afraid, like my parents, especially my dad, would have been so proud. I always joked, like I thought he would like put put it on a billboard on the side of the freeway, just with pride. And so I really didn't tell them much. In fact, it was probably harder on them than me, because when I deployed, I mean, we worked like 20 hour days, like you are constantly working and constantly under stress, and so when I would get, like, a an email from my mom, and communications then were not as easy as they are now, I couldn't just FaceTime someone, right? And so I would kind of pull back and avoid family.
I would absolutely, I, you know, avoiding friends was easy. It's hard to hard to keep friends when you're constantly disappearing for months on end and things like that. But with my family, I just kind of avoided them so I didn't have to deal with the guilt of making them feel stressed, I guess is the best way I could explain it. What did they think you're doing? Though they knew I was in war zones, and they knew the countries I was in, I think they had a general idea that I was conducting espionage, but they didn't know what that entailed at all. Like, I definitely did not tell them I was going out in the red zone, or, you know, outside the wire, as you say, on a daily basis, they did not know that I would send pictures home sometimes of of me sitting in a field of flowers in Kurdistan, like, look mom, it's so safe and beautiful. But you know, probably not.
Alan Fleischmann
Does she ever talk about that?
Shawnee Delaney
No, not really, not really, yeah. But they
Alan Fleischmann
were happy when you got home, I imagine as well, yeah, yeah, for sure. Did you come home in the, you know, in the like, holidays, or come back at certain times, or not really?
Shawnee Delaney
No. So we, we would do six months at a time. So you're out for six months. There's a couple months beforehand where you're going through training, you know, driving, shooting, training, all the fun stuff. And then when you come home, there's a period of readjustment. And for me, it was always challenging, because you're in this war zone. You are seeing death constantly. You are trying to save lives, you are trying to make a difference, and then coming home and being around people who are worried about their Starbucks being hot enough, or things that seemed really trivial at the time, it was kind of a big culture shock every time I came home from a deployment.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, for you, as a culture shock, yeah. I imagine that was a big deal for when you came home, that it was always different. And as part of your DIA training, you spend time at the six month training ground known as The Farm, as you and I talked about, tell us a little bit about The Farm and what kind of training you did there, and how you feel prepared you for your service abroad, actually, where you served elsewhere.
Shawnee Delaney
That's a good question. How it prepared me… I will start by saying the dork that I am, and remember, this is all I ever wanted to do was graduate from The Farm. I loved every second of it. I know a lot of people. In fact, probably most people, were incredibly miserable. They try to make it miserable. I relished every challenge, and they were not easy. I was the only student, to my knowledge, who stayed every weekend. So normally, they would release students on the weekends to go to D.C. or go just relax, right? Take a mental break. But for me, I push myself constantly. Bit of an overachiever. I had to graduate, and so every weekend, I would stay, I would case areas. I would write up site casing reports. I would do everything that I needed to do to kind of stay ahead of the game.
I also did not realize it at the time, but I will chat with anyone. I enjoy chatting with people. And so I kind of befriended a couple gate guards, which was very handy, because later on in the course, when things were happening on base, I would pull up to the gate and they would give me kind of a tip, like, hey, you might want to, you know, throw your papers out or stuff like that. And so that was incredibly helpful. I would say that it did prepare me as far as trade craft, which obviously I can't speak about, but I wish that there had been a bit more on on empathy and human nature, like what I work in now is very heavily involved with human nature, natural human traits. And that's one thing that I think I kind of had to learn just by doing more than anything.
Alan Fleischmann
That's cool. It sounds a little bit more they did not teach you anything about the EQ side of the empathy science.
Shawnee Delaney
So they did, but I feel like everything was glossed over so quickly because they really needed to get people good on trade craft that that was a little bit frustrating for me, because I love that EQ side also. What I learned is that technology, obviously is evolving so fast that a lot of the trade craft and things they were teaching I felt were outdated back then, and so I'm hoping and assuming that they're continually evolving. I'm sure they are, but yeah, they're, I think, using technology more and kind of that empathy and behavioral psychology. If they had dove in more on that, I think a lot of people would have stronger case officers, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
What interests me, actually, I'm sure it interests you too, is how they train you to use empathy, though I thought they did. I mean, I thought that was something that you actually, I was that's been used to then you brought out, or is that something that they that you, that did you bring to the table, that if they didn't actually have it, offered just a little bit more about that I would use a highly, high, high EQ person, yeah.
Shawnee Delaney
I did not say a word. I smiled and nodded. I did what I was told. We had a saying, cooperate and graduate, right? Just smile and nod. It's now, when I look back, that I realized that they were kind of lacking in that. And again, I'm sure that's changed. But I'm also one of those people that I'm always, constantly trying to improve myself. And so everything I'm doing, I'm like, oh, we could make it better by doing this. I'm the good idea fairy. Really, it's a curse. So that's kind of, as I look back on it, what I think.
Alan Fleischmann
Oh, and if you had to think about the training, do they do they offer that training now?
Shawnee Delaney
Like, what I'm talking about? Not really. I don't know. I don't know, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
Was that something that you'd actually if you had to, if you had to pick the right kind of train, do you know what you would want to train people to, to go through to, to actually use empathy more.
Shawnee Delaney
Oh, yeah. And actually, it's kind of what I do now. So what I've realized is that the the trade craft, which obviously I don't teach, is classified, but the trade craft and the manipulation that they taught us is the exact same techniques that are the exact same techniques that threat actors are using against people every day, fraudsters, organized criminal groups, nation states, terrorist groups, etc. So when you think about things like social engineering, for example, they're leveraging, manipulating your natural human behaviors, your natural human traits like trust. People are inherently trusting, right? So as a spy, I know people are inherently trusting, or I should have known, known that if they had dug into that. And so I think it would make a stronger case officer, because you can kind of play puppeteer a bit better, for lack of better words, when you are trying to develop and manipulate that relationship into what you want it to be.
Alan Fleischmann
And so when you moved over to the private sector, and you became associate director at Merck, and you got involved in their as their trade secret intellectual property protection and that program there, what was that transition like? And I imagine that's where the empathy started becoming into as.
Shawnee Delaney
Well, I think I've always had the empathy. In fact, it's kind of been I'm an empath, like open the dictionary, my picture will be there under empath, which is a blessing and a curse. But I realized while I was at DIA and I had some really challenging operations with some really unique people around the world. That's when I started realizing that I was actually an incredible case officer, because I was using empathy naturally, being able to put myself in someone's shoes in a life that you could not ever comprehend. Living really helps me get closer to my sources, my assets, and helped me recruit more people. If that makes sense.
Alan Fleischmann
So tell us about the transition a little bit. And was that a big transition for you?
Shawnee Delaney
It was, I wasn't thrilled to leave DIA. I left for–
Alan Fleischmann
What made you leave?
Shawnee Delaney
I left because I was having a lot of medical issues that I could not keep up with, because I was constantly either deployed in a war zone or TDY, temporary duty around the world trying to run and recruit assets. So like, if I'm home one day a month, I can't schedule a doctor's appointment, you know. So I got really burnt out. And then I hate to say it, but it was a really, really toxic culture. Like, remarkably so. And I just got beat down to a point where I wasn't willing to take it anymore, so that it was a really tough decision, and then I left knowing that I wanted to go have kids. I wanted to try the mom thing. And so the Merc thing actually kind of fell in my lap at the right time, and when I switched from DIA to Merck, it was an incredible culture shock, because I'm so used to the military way of doing everything right.
And then Merck was totally different with with DIA, everything's compartmentalized, and there's classification labels, and you only learn things if you need to know. And in pharma, it's big ideas and information sharing. And how are we going to develop the next blockbuster drug if we don't share what our research is? And so when I came in and was working on their intellectual property and trade secret protection program, say that five times fast. I just I learned so much, and was able to kind of adjust fire, so to speak, for how I was trying to do things the DIA and government way, military say, and kind of merge it into the private sector way, and help people who were so used to culturally sharing with the world, helping them understand that need to know, for example, is really, really important if they really value their work. People have heard like trust but verify. But I actually prefer the term verify and then trust. So teaching these people to verify, who are you sharing this with? Who's requesting access? Why are they requesting access? Start asking those questions before you just blindly share. So I was able, it took some time, but I was able to really learn how to effectively shift the organizational culture. So people embraced it a lot more.
Alan Fleischmann
And did they? Did they have that job before you came along?
Shawnee Delaney
They so there was one person before me who actually hired me who wanted to stand up that program. So the two of us kind of combined forces and and stood up the program.
Alan Fleischmann
That was that was cool. You were the bit of an entrepreneur.
Shawnee Delaney
I learned a lot.
Alan Fleischmann
And what made you choose Merck?
Shawnee Delaney
Merck chose me. I'm happy to say that after DIA everything's chosen me. Yeah, somebody that I knew who was a former CIA asset was there and said, hey, they're hiring for this, and you'd be great. And so that kind of fell in my lap. And then I was at Merck for three years, and was recruited by a couple of my former instructors from The Farm, oddly, who had moved into Homeland Security. And so they recruited me, and I went and worked for ICs, cert, industrial control system, Cyber Emergency Response Team, again, say that five times fast. And so I worked in Idaho National Labs for DHS for a while, and then was recruited again by another former case officer that I worked with in Germany, who hooked me up with a job in Uber. And he was, he at the time wouldn't tell me. He's like, it's a unicorn. I can't tell you who it'll be great. I was like, okay, I like a challenge. So that's when I joined Uber, and I was there for six years.
Alan Fleischmann
So how long were you then at work before you went to Uber? Three years? Wow. And you did serve as an IT specialist at the at Homeland Security as well. Yes, was that in between?
Shawnee Delaney
That was in between. That was in between Merck and Uber, and I missed the mission, like I missed the government mission. I'm a very mission driven person, and so to go from government, you're talking about culture shock, right? To go from government and having this very strong mission, and then to go to a private sector company where, what's the mission, to make money? Like, I don't understand, where's our mission? That was kind of a hard thing for me to digest. And so when I was recruited like these instructors, I come to Homeland Security, the mission's great, you know, industrial control systems, there's huge vulnerabilities. I was like, yay. So that's why I got lured in there, very good.
Alan Fleischmann
So tell us about the Uber experience. And you went back to the West Coast.
Shawnee Delaney
I went back, yeah, I went back to my home state of California, yes, back to the Bay Area. And Uber was very interesting. I was hired into a team called Strategic Services Group, SSG, which, if anyone has followed the Uber versus Waymo case, they are mentioned prominently. I was the fourth person to join that group, and had no clue what was going on with Uber versus Waymo and all this stuff. But shortly after I got hired, I was kind of dragged into it. They had ordered me to be deposed in the Uber Waymo suit. I was like, I don't know what's going on. Luckily, as I pulled into the parking garage that day, they were like, no, never mind. We don't need to depose you. But everyone above me, so the three people on the team all the way up to the CEO either quit quickly or got fired. And so I was kind of left standing there like, huh? So now what?
And so I just kept pursuing, I was hired and brought in to help stand up an Insider Threat program for the company. And so I just kept doing that. And I started with our Autonomous Technologies Group ATG, where, you know the driverless cars, autonomous cars, which is a super, super cool experience. I learned a ton there. So try to help them stand up an Insider Threat program, kind of as a proof of concept or a pilot to prove that it would work, and then move it into the rest of Uber, and then just kind of evolve from there and and left Uber after six years as their their head of insider threat and –
Alan Fleischmann
What made you leave?
Shawnee Delaney
I wanted to do my own thing, so I had started my own company –
Alan Fleischmann
Vaillance group. Gosh, maybe almost right.
Shawney Delaney
You have to sound a little snooty, like vaillance viols.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, it is French, right?
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, oui oui, yes. It means courage or bravery in French, yeah, I just, I like a challenge, if you can't
Alan Fleischmann
Terrible. And I said Vay-lence Group, it's Vaillance Group.
Shawnee Delaney
Everybody says it that way. Everybody does. I'm used to it. Totally fine. Okay,
Alan Fleischmann
It's like, we should start all over again. So tell us a little bit about that. What is this, that this Vaillance Group that you decided you needed to start, because it is pretty extraordinary. And the idea of being entrepreneurs, starting your own business, and scaling your business, it's pretty amazing. So you founded it in 2019. It's led by you as CEO. And it provides consulting services on insider threat vulnerability assessments, program development, which I need you to tell us more about, training and awareness, business intelligence related support. Tell us a little bit of why you did decide you want to do your own thing. It's big deal. And what gap were you hoping to fill in the market?
Shawnee Delaney
An enormous gap, I realized again, like I had mentioned earlier, recognizing that the skills that I used conducting espionage were the same skills that malicious actors were using in our companies, our businesses, our organizations, our people, and that sense of mission I was missing tremendously. And so when I started the company and decided to leave Uber to just pursue this full time. I felt that sense of mission again. So I am now able to help organizations protect their assets, their people, their facilities, their intellectual property, from malicious actors. And a lot of times I have people ask, you know, well, what's, what's your target industry? Or what's, what's, what are you looking at who's who's your target client, everyone? So if you employ humans, we can help you. Plain and simple, humans are fallible. We make mistakes, we take shortcuts, sometimes we do bad things, and that's all inside our risk. So the risk that you have by simply employing humans is insider risk. That's what we would call left of boom, before the bad thing has happened.
Now, oftentimes those bad things are unintentional. They're accidental. Maybe someone is just negligent. They know a policy, but it doesn't apply to them, because they're not doing anything bad. So they print it out from home, whatever it is. So what we do is we do human risk assessments, where we go into an organization, and we interview all the stakeholders and then some, and we get ground truth. What is your organizational culture like? It's great that you've got these, you know, maybe some bullets, but is that what your organizational culture truly is? What's the risk there? We get into morale, which is another big one. Micro stressors is another huge one. Those are all critical triggers for someone to turn into an insider threat. So if you look at human risk, insider risk is the left of boom. Insider threat is right of boom, after the bad thing has happened. And so when we're doing these human risk assessments, we're looking deep into the organization. We are interviewing people for one on one confidentially, we're getting that ground truth. We review all of the policies, processes, procedures, and then we basically formulate this very long report that says, here are all the things you're doing, great, keep doing it, but here are all the risks you have and vulnerabilities you have when it comes to human risk.
Now, one thing people don't recognize is they think it's just employees, but an insider is anyone that has access to your facilities, to your data, to your people. So oftentimes it's ex-employees, it's third parties, it's vendors, it's partners, those are all considered insiders.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, let me so let me understand this little bit. So prior to starting Vaillance Group, you went back to school. You attended Harvard Business School, University of Maryland, Global Campus, later George Mason University. You did all that before you went back to do that. And I'm just curious a little bit about, did that inspire you to start this extraordinary firm? And you know, this idea you talked earlier about lifelong learning and you know, and how that you just curious and you're insatiably wanting to learn different things. I mean, I imagine with cybersecurity, intelligence, you know, you're constantly having to be ahead of the game, thinking and challenging and learning and threats. You have to think around the corner, you know, do things that are both preemptive as well as proactive as well. How would you recommend to corporations and, frankly, countries to be thinking about preemptive measures to protect themselves?
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, great question. A lot in there. Yeah, there's a lot in there. First of all, with the education piece, I can never stop learning. I think I would die if I just stopped learning. And so the masters, the second, I got the first masters before I even joined DIA in counterterrorism, counter proliferation. My second masters was while I was at Homeland Security and a little bit into Uber. I did a masters in cyber security. And then now, because you know, who needs sleep, I'm trying to do a third Master's in industrial organizational psychology.
The other stuff right now, yeah, I keep Okay, between us, I keep kicking the can because I don't like statistics, and that's my next class I have to take. So I'm like, I'll do it next semester, but I'm halfway there. So for me, when we're talking human risk in any capacity, I feel like I have to keep learning, because it is constantly changing and evolving. I mean, look at just with AI and Gen AI and deep fakes and voice cloning and all the things it has made, insider threat and external threats just proliferate substantially, right? It's shot, shot through the roof. And so I just feel this drive and this pull to help educate organizations and companies and how to protect themselves.
So aside from things like human risk assessments, which I highly, highly recommend, because it gives you the roadmap to build out a program, we build out programs for companies, turnkey programs. We'll build out foundational documents and governance and stuff like that. But training and awareness really is my passion. I love it, I love it, I love it. So I do a ton of keynotes, dozens and dozens and dozens a year. We do trainings and E-learnings. But what I tell organizations is, if you want to protect yourself, the first thing is, you have to educate your employees and your enterprise on how they potentially leave you at risk. But with the caveat that a lot of organizations will have training, it's like, do this. Don't do this because we said it. You have to protect us. Nobody cares about human nature. Remember, human nature is what's in it for me. And so if companies change how they address this, and instead they educate employees, here are all the ways that you can protect yourself and your families from cyber threats, from human threats, from all of these threats. These people are going to build good muscle memory, and they're going to do it at home, especially with people working remote, but they're going to take those good practices back to work and they're going to listen. So when I'm doing training, for example, on AI, I talk about all the ways the AI can target individuals and businesses, but I also talk about families, because all the ways that people can protect themselves and their family are the same ways that they can protect the businesses.
Alan Fleischmann
Yes, that's cool. And you see actually how we're all vulnerable. The world is used to be very separate, private sector, public sector, civil society, and now a lot of those dangers you're talking about are really we're vulnerable in all three and many people are involved in all three sectors, and yeah, locally and globally. So where you're vulnerable in one you're vulnerable absolutely.
Shawnee Delaney
And I think, sorry, I was going to say that the biggest problem I see is when people think it can't happen to them, be it an individual or company. I've seen both more times than I can count, but my best advice for anyone listening is it can absolutely happen to you, so take steps to mitigate the damage. I like to call it the security onion. So every little layer you add, having secure long, you know, long and strong passwords, using encryption, segmenting your Wi-Fi network, all the little things for businesses, employee life, cycle, management. There's so many free or cheap things you can do just in that you add layer after layer, and it basically makes it nothing's perfect. Anything connected to the internet is vulnerable, but you make it a little bit harder for the threat actor to target you. And they'll go on to the next person who gives.
Alan Fleischmann
an example. The kind of things you do when you go in is you do, you talk, you start. I mean, ACE has never blank slate in the age of, you know, cyber challenges and all that. But you could go in and you kind of do an assessment and kind of see where they are, where the, you know, where their focus has been, where they need additional protection, then you kind of go through and kind of build out these programs.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, exactly. So you could give me three companies in the same industry, and we're going to do everything completely different for them, because organizational culture plays such a huge part in building out these programs. Think about all the stakeholders that might have a foot in insider threat. That'd be it your global security, legal, HR, compliance. I could keep going. Everybody touches it. And so some organizations, I just had a call today with a company where, organizationally, it is the big, you know, they're the big head honcho in the company. They have the huge budget. They control everything. So how does one address, hey, we want to start an Insider Threat program without kind of rocking the boat, where people are like, hey, that should be ours.
So I see a lot of people fighting over who controls it or who should control it, when, in reality, it should not fall under it at all. So we help companies kind of navigate those challenges. And then within each industry, within each company, they're going to have really, really unique vulnerabilities. And those vulnerabilities can be where they're located in the world. Where do they do business in the world? Where are their partners? Where are their employees from? Are they hiring remote workers? There's a million different things. And so we basically give a full assessment into all of that, including counterintelligence, which is a huge piece of it, and help then companies build out this program. So the way I can best describe it in a nutshell, would be like kind of three steps. We do the HRA, that human risk assessment. We see where you are, we then build out a program based on that HRA, knowing where you are, and then we do training and awareness to make sure everyone in the enterprise is on the same page. You could have all the bells and whistles, all the fancy tools. You could spend millions a year on fancy tools. But it doesn't matter if your employees are not educated into what all of this is and what it means and why it's important.
Alan Fleischmann
Because if they're vulnerable, then you're vulnerable. If they make those vulnerable, then you're vulnerable. Because there's so many sleeves and, yeah, these around your system because of them, even though you might be doing all the right things, exactly.
Shawnee Delaney
It only takes one, yep. And you don't want to be on the front page of The New York Times for the bad stuff, right?
Alan Fleischmann
No. And a lot of people's customers depend on the trust of confidentiality and, you know, obviously there, in some cases, the lifeblood of their work is done in partnership with some of these companies that they can't afford to have these kinds of leaks. How do you you go in there as part of it, doing a regular audit of making sure that things are being kept up. And do you actually help them train employees as well?
Shawnee Delaney
Yes, and that's my favorite part. Actually, I love getting down eye to eye with the employees. And we have, we have a ton of different trainings, and there's basically different levels, if you will. Like, I always start with, like, the eye opening. You know, I used to be a spy. Everything I did. This is how social engineers are using and people's eyes are really big, like, oh, oh, my gosh. I had no idea. But then we're teaching practical steps that are really easy and constantly in every speech and everything I'm doing, it's, please share this with your family, please.
Alan Fleischmann
So actually take it home.
Shawnee Delaney
Yes, yes, they have to take it home. I mean, my kid, I'm raising good little cyber ninjas here at home. And how are you doing that repetition? So, I tell a lot of people, the two vulnerable populations, when you think about it, really are our parents and our kids, because both of them know it all right, when maybe it's just my parents might or they're not interested. Right? Exactly. It doesn't apply. It doesn't apply to me, but the best way to get through to them is to teach them through case studies and news stories and things that impact their age group. So I'm not going to teach my parents the dangers of online gaming. They don't game online, nor do my kids. I won't let them because I'm mean, but I'm going to teach them about the grandparent scam and the gold bar scam and voice cloning. We're going to have a safe word. My kids and I have a safe word, a password, if you will. They know that my voice is in the public. They know my likeness is in the public. So if I FaceTime them or call them and I say something or tell them to do something they weren't expecting, or it's just kind of odd, they feel empowered to say, Mom, what's the password? And only the four of us know it. And it's things like that.
You're building good, good memory, good muscle memory and good cyber hygiene. But it carries over to business. For example, I think it was Ferrari, I hope I'm not remembering wrong. There was an executive with Ferrari, I believe, who almost fell victim to a, it was either a voice cloning or a Zoom zoom clone, where the person was using deep fakes, deep fake technology, and they were impersonating another executive. And this guy was like, gosh, something just doesn't seem right. They were asking, asking him to transfer money. And so he challenged, and he said, what, I think it was like, what was the name of that book you were reading last week or something to that effect? And that stopped it. He realized that it was fraud. So it wasn't real. So teaching people to take that step back and think, okay, do I feel a sense of urgency or anxiety or stress? This is all stuff I teach my kids, whatever that text is or the email is or the phone call is that I just got. Am I feeling big emotions? If I am, take a step back and investigate before you take action.
Alan Fleischmann
And your kids know that fantastic training for your kids, right? They know they do. You know the biggest, hardest thing to ask, to teach people is how to ask questions, more than have the answers, yeah, and follow your intuition. It's what our firm does every day. Always say, it's not the answers. We always have to come up with the answers, but it's the questions, the humility to not assume and to know that if something doesn't feel right, that it's our obligation to actually ask about it.
Shawnee Delaney
And that, I mean, that goes back to my days in espionage. They always, you know, you always say, trust your gut. You have to listen to your training and follow your training, but you have to listen to your gut, too. If there's two things you need, both of them in life, you need both of them
Alan Fleischmann
And you're living by that every day, and you find you have receptive audiences. And is it hard? Are you dealing with with the General Counsel's Office, or each client a different thing? Are you dealing with the CEO's office?
Shawnee Delaney
Each client is different. I've been engaged at every level, but it doesn't really matter who brings me in because I go up, down, left and right, we really dive in. I find that a lot of organizations, when I do the stakeholder interviews, you know, they give me all the C suite or all the vice presidents, that's great, but they all tell me the same thing, things are good. Everyone's happy when I go down a level or down two levels, that's when I start to get the ground truth that really helps impact that report.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. What would you want current clients, future clients, people like me, to understand about you in a nutshell, how would you describe violence? I mean what I now that I know that it stands for, you know, bravery or valor in English. I mean, honestly, what you're saying is, you know, be bold, yeah, have that grit and determination that you can actually protect yourself. Be courageous. And understand that danger and difficulty is not a way of life. It's something you can actually deal with, but it has to be an everyday thing, right? You constantly need to, you know, to show that strength, I guess, that resilience, every day. But it's a challenging where we live, and it's only becoming more challenging with deepfakes and other threats. But what would you tell them that they need? And what would you tell them that you provide, in a nutshell?
Shawnee Delaney
So we provide a way to protect you from your human risk, which, if you employ humans, you have human risk, period, full stop. People have to be vigilant, both at home and at work. People have to recognize that it can happen to them like I said, I have met so many people, heads of security at major companies developing really incredible intellectual property and trade secrets have told me they're not going to go for us. They're going to go for the bigger company. That's wrong. That's so wrong.
When I was targeting people, I was looking for, again, in espionage, but I was looking for people who were disgruntled. I was looking for people who wanted to move up in the world but felt like they weren't appreciated. Right? These are vulnerabilities, and people don't like to hear it, but everybody, at some point in their life has a vulnerability that you know, it's like your personal rock bottom. I've hit mine. I don't know if you've hit yours, but we're all going to hit it at some point, and that's when threat actors strike. And so I would really advise people to educate their loved ones on social media. Please minimize the stuff you post on social media. And I don't mean quantity. I mean you don't need to divulge that you're disgruntled. You don't need to divulge the secret projects you work on at work, things like that are basically the puzzle pieces that threat actors like myself used to pull online to build a targeting package to know everything about you. So when Alan, I built this beautiful targeting package on you, I know all about your family and your likes. I know your favorite band, I know your favorite food. I don't have to get that just from your personal profile, because you can't control what your friends or your coworkers or your neighbors or your kids or your parents, what they are all posting, that threat actors can just kind of take those pieces and put that package together. So I want people to be more thoughtful about what they put out in the world, and recognize that they answer a phone call from an unknown number and they say, hello, someone's now got your voice, right? So make sure that you've got steps in place to mitigate the risks to you, your family and your business absolutely will happen to you
Alan Fleischmann
And you're not telling people that that you just kind of hide under a rock a little bit, because it is kind of scary, actually?
Shawnee Delaney
It is scary because the threats are pervasive. I mean, think about ubiquitous. Technical surveillance is everywhere, from your online shopping to your new automobile to your phone to the cameras, all the traffic cameras, right? Surveillance, technical surveillance is prevalent. So I think there's a fine line between wearing a tin foil hat at all times and living in fear and just being smart about what you have in your life. We are human. We're going to take shortcuts. I have Alexa, for example, I bought my kids little Alexa speakers so they could have dance parties when I'm trying to make dinner. When those Alexas are not rocking, they're unplugged, right? That's my step to add a layer of security.
Alan Fleischmann
But rather than turn it off, but you don't know, whatever turns off, you're just going to unplug it.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, connected equals hacked, period. So when you buy a new appliance, you're, I don't know, washing machine, and it says, connect to our app. No, I have not connected any my appliances. That, though, every single thing you've connected and is an additional threat vector. There are so many incidents of companies. There's a unnamed North American casino in 2019 that got hacked through a fish tank thermometer, and the threat actors took everything on their high roller database and they ex filled it through this fish tank thermometer. There are homes where people install security cameras or baby monitors or thermostats, smart thermostats, and if those are all in the same network as your laptop and your TV and et cetera. One hack, one breach, your whole network is compromised. So that's why I mentioned like network segmentation. I've got a network for my TV and for my work computer and for my kids, because I don't trust them, you know, all these things like, it's just the security onion, right? Layer after layer after layer, baby steps, really, but –
Alan Fleischmann
It's but sometimes very practical, common sense, steps that you're talking about, unplug it, things like that that make a big difference.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, absolutely. And changing, like I talked about baby monitors and cameras, routers, those are all things that come with a default username and password. Change them. You get it out of the box. The first thing you do is you change it. And it needs to be long and gibberish. It should not be easy to guess. Look, when I got my masters in cybersecurity, we had labs where we would crack passwords, and if I can do it, anyone can do it, and now, with AI and technology, you can do it in in split seconds.
Alan Fleischmann
And important to have different passwords for different things, which is a nightmare, then how do you keep up with which which passport words you have? But you shouldn't have one password for many things.
Shawnee Delaney
Exactly. Yeah, please don't, because those are actually advertised on the dark web, and it's kind of insulting, but these threat actors will sell stuff on the dark web for very cheap, like, I could buy your whole identity very cheap, good price. But people think, well, it's not going to happen to me, or they steal this password. They've got everything I buy at gap or whatever. But it's more than that, because so many people reuse passwords. They now have that password for everything, and you're most likely using the same email to log in to that account as the one that was compromised. So people can go on the dark web. Threat actors know this. They buy this data, and then they just steal everything. And I can tell you, I've had my identity stolen, gosh, probably 10 years ago. It's horrible. It's horrible.
Alan Fleischmann
And do you actually work with individuals as well as companies? Like, if someone just says, okay, I want you to focus on the CEO or focus on the one individual, obviously, to make it really protected, you need the whole the whole ecosystem. Yeah, you cooperate, but you actually do that as well, where you kind of do an assessment of the person, do a 360?
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, absolutely. Because especially if someone's C suite, or they're very public, they are going to need additional layers. And there's a lot more than my company looks into aside aside from that.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s amazing. And you do all kinds of companies, so fortune 10 all the way through to startups and small companies as well.
Shawnee Delaney
We do absolutely everyone. I'm not kidding when I say, if you have humans, we can help.
Alan Fleischmann
And why only humans? I imagine that the age of AI, there'll be vulnerabilities with AI as well.
Shawnee Delaney
So, think about it. So my friend Don Fries says it's the skin behind the keyboard. Everyone thinks of cyber and all this up in the cloud and all this stuff the computers aren't doing it. It takes a person. It's all that human angle.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. And then I guess this is a leadership matters show, and you're a leader. I imagine what you'd say right now is you're not being a very good leader if you're not taking this as a serious precaution.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, yeah, it's true. In fact, there, there have been studies recently. Just you had mentioned AI, I want to say it was 51% of C suite, like business leaders, said that they are not giving employees training and how to recognize a deep fake. For example, over half there are there. I think it was 34% of leaders say, AI has not increased our risk. And to that, I say, please call me. Send them my way. We need to talk, because that's so far from the truth. AI in particular has really lowered the barrier to entry when we're talking about fraud or espionage or any of these things, right? I can spend time crafting a phishing email where I'm targeting you, Alan, and I've done some due diligence, so maybe I know some stuff about your life, till I make it you know, targeted to you, so you're more likely to click it. But if I use AI, it can actually scrape the web for me. There will be no grammatical errors, no misspellings. It will be targeted. I can have it written in a certain tone that I know you would respond to. You can make it so targeted and so brilliant that the chance that it gets clicked on increases significantly. Now, in addition to that, we can do it in mass. So I'm not just targeting you, I'm targeting 100,000 people at one click kind of thing.
Alan Fleischmann
And this is true of anybody who's out there, whether it's public sector, private sector, civil society, nonprofits, it doesn't matter. If there does not matter. They're out there in any way, shape or form.
Shawnee Delaney
It does. It doesn't matter. And think about within an organization, I'm not talking to individuals now, thinking about companies within your company, I don't care if it's a two person company or 100,000 person company. Do you have anything in that company that would help a competitor, right? It could be your marketing plans, it could be your projections, it could be your IP. It could be anything, if you have anything, and you do that could help a competitor that you would not want a competitor to have. You have to protect that, and you have to protect that from fraud, from sabotage, from espionage, from media leaks, from data leaks, from ransomware, from all the things and all of those things. What do they boil down to humans?
Alan Fleischmann
That's, that's at the end of the day, that's, we're our own we're our own best friend and our own worst enemy. Yeah. And it sounds like unwittingly.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah. I mean, look, your employees are your biggest asset, but unfortunately, they're also your biggest vulnerability.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to learning a lot more about this and then helping to spread the word, because it sounds like it's only gonna become a bigger issue for so many, and we need to make sure that people are thinking about, you know, the dark side of things as much as the light.
Shawnee Delaney
For sure, for sure. I love it.
Alan Fleischmann
For good reason. And now I love the word Vaillance Group, because I now know what that, what it means, and it is really, truly Laurel Strategies. I would say my firm is about Laurel, the success and victory in sports and academia, where you're built with Vaillance is a similar thing, where you're talking about courage and and, you know, victory of, you know, and bravery and valor. And at the end of the day, you're saying, you know, look deep, look wide, but get it done.
Shawnee Delaney
Yeah, absolutely, just do something. Please. Just do something.
Alan Fleischmann
What does it do? I mean, last question. You have a lot of competition in this space.
Shawnee Delaney
Not really. There are, you know, like the big four. There are consultancies that, I politely say, dabble in insider threat. But I know people on the teams and they don't truly understand it. I am looking at it, and my team is looking at it from a space where we used to be. I used to be the threat actor I used to recruit the vulnerable Insider. I understand the psychology and the manipulation and how that works. I've done investigations, corporate investigations, I've sat across the table from people who have done all the bad things, and I've built programs for major companies around the world, right? So I'm looking at this from a different angle, a different lens than anyone else is. So the experience that I bring and the experience that my team brings is absolutely unlike anything else in the world, and we're very, very proud of it. This is all we do. We eat, sleep and breathe human risk.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, you’re listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Allen Fleischmann. We just spent the last hour with Shawnee Delaney, who is an insider threat expert, a CEO, a cyber security consultant, and her company, Vaillance Group, is really one of the most important bespoke insider threat consultancies and training organizations in the world. And she's a decorated intelligence officer, a licensed private investigator, and because of her experience conducting 1,000s of public and private sector investigations, she's the one to talk to if you want to secure your organization, your enterprise, your company, your firm, anywhere in the world. This is such an honor and pleasure to be with you. You have led a life of Vaillance and in many ways, I feel like you're giving back by what you're doing every day with the companies and organizations in which you work. So thank you so much Shawnee for joining us today.
Shawnee Delaney
Thank you so much for having me, and I hope everyone stays safe out there.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, me too.