Steve sits down with Andra Zaharia, a freelance content marketer with ten years of experience as a communication specialist. She has focused on the infosec industry for five of those years.

A self-proclaimed “cyber-realist”, Andra helps her clients make smarter decisions as they navigate our fast-paced and ever-evolving information society. Her work involves helping organizations build scalable content systems, alongside promoting cybersecurity literacy to make products accessible to a wider audience.

Listen in as Andra illustrates the power of community as she shares her time in the startup world, where she juggled the no-nonsense demands of growing a company with her values-driven approach to business and marketing.

She then shares her top lessons learned about mentorship while being part of one of the first cohorts of Seth Godin’s altMBA. Also, in line with her belief in ethical marketing that puts the human first and top-of-mind, Andra talks about one of the biggest pitfalls in marketing cybersecurity: overreliance on automation over high-touch interactions.

Key Takeaways:

• You have to find alignment between your values and the role you take on in the industry you work in. Such alignment leads to exponential growth in both your personal and professional development.
• When working in a startup, prioritization of tasks is crucial considering a relatively small budget and limited resources.
• We need three kinds of people in our lives for continuous growth: mentors to learn from, peers to discuss our learnings with, and mentees with which we can teach what we’ve learned.
• While publishing articles or blog posts regularly is a great strategy to build authority, another powerful, albeit less-utilized tactic is to create a comprehensive, even definitive guide to whatever it is you are trying to be seen as an authority in.
• Automation is not meant to replace you. It is meant to help you offload certain tasks, but it can never replicate your humanity with all its creativity and ability to personalize interactions.

Connect with Andra Zaharia on LinkedIn.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, welcome back everyone to the show! I've got a great guest today. Her name is Andra Zaharia, like we always do on this podcast, there's not a lot of fluff on the intro we just dive into stories. So, we're gonna do that again today. The first story that Andra's gonna tell us is about the power of communities. So Andra, go ahead and take it away. 

Andra Zaharia: So, Steve, this is one of my favorite stories because it was actually an inflection point in my life. I was working for a tech conference in Bucharest where I live, it had been kind of a formative event that had constantly nurtured for years the tech community and the startup community there. Then it also had a co-working space where obviously there were like a hundred plus people working very bustling and a lot big energy, big kind of ambition there, and a lot of kindness as well, which was very interesting. I was part of that and I got to see that happen every day. It was a bit like being also involved, but sending on the sidelines too, which was a strange role but an interesting one, nonetheless, I had been working in with startups and then tech for quite a few years, but I hadn't really found something that clicked with me. So through the relationships that constantly grew and developed there in that place, I was actually able to form a kind of a friendship with one of the top kind of more mature marketers there who actually got recruited by a Danish cybersecurity company to start a team in Romania, and kind of form a team there because there's a huge pool of technical talent there and they wanted to tap into that. We kind of shared this common passion and interest for content marketing and ethical marketing, which at the time didn't really have a name and it wasn't really a trend, it was just something that we were both naturally interested in. One day, he sat me down and there was this moment of silence which sometimes kind of feel like it brings on ominous stuff but this time it was actually something good. He told me, “Hey, here's the thing why I invited you to launch today because I wanted to ask if you'd like to join our startup, there were just three people in it. I knew the risks of getting involved with the startup and one work for, one looked like.” So it was very interesting for me to consider an industry that felt so foreign and that felt so different from anything else that I had done. It still feels a bit exotic to most people today, even if you see it in the news a lot more often. What was interesting to me at the time is that I discovered very fast through his prior experience with this industry, that first of all, cybersecurity was a lot about people and that was my first contact with it. I think that that really shaped everything that I did and everything I discovered about this space. It felt like a bit of intuition for me to say “yes” at that moment, but I had no idea the role that it would later play in my life. Of course, because you never, you only see that it–

Steve Goldhaber: It only makes sense looking backward, never looking forward. 

Andra Zaharia: Exactly exactly. I said, yes, I was able to stay in the community as well because we were working from that coworking space. So it was a very smooth transition, but a very interesting one at the same time, because I saw that people were really interested in what work looks like for a marketer in the cybersecurity space because it feels so abstract and so emotionally detached from things, that's what I found out is just really a preconception. It's not a reality of things. There are so many good people in that industry. What that showed me is that you have to find alignment between your values and the role that you take on, the industry that you decide to contribute to. I guess the biggest lesson from this experience was exactly this– that I got to work with a great person because that's how you usually decide to go for a job or that's how I usually decide to work with a client or get hired in previous roles. It was the further person and it showed me that this kind of alignment can really put your professional path and your personal growth path on just an upward slope. That's really, really intense and that's very rewarding when you find something that really clicks with your values. In my case, it was about doing a lot of educational content, it was about creating a brand that's really in service of the people, that stands for values that are a lot more approachable, and that is a lot more empathetic towards people which is not usually the case in cybersecurity. So we got to try our hand at a bunch of things because we had total freedom, which was fantastic. That was an inflection point because I realized that from that moment on, I was a lot more aware of my work and I was able to also help others gain more awareness of how they work and how they want to build their careers forward. At a time in your twenties, when perhaps other generations weren't as aware as current generations are of their careers. So that was a very interesting experience, that seems smooth at the time, but realized was quite transformative. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I've had a couple of opportunities earlier in my career to work for a startup and I didn't take the opportunity to do it. I think my challenge at the time was, this was probably around 2000, right? So this is like the “.com -era” when things were going nuts. It was so hard for me to determine that I knew I wanted all this digital experience, but the startup environment was almost like two nuts for me. If you were at a really small company, the culture was really just like, “Who was the founder or the CEO?” Where I chose to go the other route where I went to a bigger company that had a digital department. So I'm curious as you went and made that decision, what goes through your mind that first day or two when you accepted the job? Is it thrilling? Is it fearful? Is it both? What went through your mind? 

Andra Zaharia: “Where do I start?” Honestly, that was the first question because we only had a three-page website. So we had to build everything from the ground up and there was so much to do. I feel like this is a key topic that I've seen because I've continued to work with startups or in startups ever since, you know, in the past 10 years. I've seen that consistently the ability to prioritize is essential. I know that prioritization is something that we always talk about in management and our personal lives and throughout our lives in general, but in startups,  when you are at the beginning and you need to build everything, you have to decide what to do first, what to focus on, how to repurpose things as much as possible, and how to do this without a budget. I've always been scrappy. I enjoyed this a lot more than having big budgets, which I know may sound strange, but I do like it, I love organic growth and that's my space. That's my thing. So the good part about this was that we were all wondering, “Hey, how do we get things done really fast?” But at the same time, it was a very supportive environment. The CMO who is the one who hired me was really very trusting, very empowering, very supportive, and very kind. It was not the usual startup environment. It was not about a hustle. It was not about just pushing things and pushing for growth. It was about that as well, but with a completely different approach, which I found refreshing and I found different. It allowed me to explore and experiment with things, whatever were projects, ideas, or things about positioning. I was able to kind of dip my toes in all of the areas and I was constantly involved in the entire information flow and that was a very maturing experience. So I really enjoy that. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's amazing. The smaller the company I've worked for, even in my own business at 26 Characters, the learning curve is exponential, when I've been at–

Andra Zaharia: Yes

Steve Goldhaber: –really large companies, there's more layers, there's more tiers, and there's still good experiences. I've given people advice over my career to say like, “I think you gotta do both.” I think you, you have to do the smaller company and then you also have to do the ginormous company. Once you've had both of those experiences, you're really better-suited long-term in your career because you know how to play both games and they're very different games. One is a lot of understanding of how the machine works in diplomacy and the other one is more about like strip away all the nonsense and it's just if we're not growing and selling, we are dying. I've always enjoyed both of those worlds. Okay. So thanks for sharing the story about the startup. We're gonna jump into another story now. This one is almost always underserved. I think in the B2B world, we get caught up in maybe technology or sales. We don't take a step back and focus on mentorship and being shown away or a path. I think sometimes we kind of look at mentorship as like an inoculation, like, “Hey, we're gonna send you to that seminar, that one day you'll get some insights, and then you'll feel good and then go back to work.” So tell us your story about the importance of mentorship specifically around one of the marketers that I've followed over the years and read a ton of his books which is Seth Godin. Take it away. 

Andra Zaharia: It was around the time when a lot of big changes were coming into my life, but I had no idea they were coming and they were coming all at the same time. It's kind of that moment before the storm, where you have no idea what's about to happen, and how things are about to escalate, but in a good way this time. The CMO that had hired me for this cybersecurity startup had done one of the first cohorts or was part of one of the first cohorts of the altMBA, Seth Godin's workshop. It's a 10-week long program. So throughout his entire experience, he would share with us and he would sit us down, we would sit for lunch, and he would talk to us about his realizations, how the experience was structured, what kind of people participated, and how it made him reflect about the kind of work that he's doing and what he wants to do next. The deep kind of very personal connection that he had with work and how that connected to his identity and how it's that obviously overflowed into his life. So that kind of honesty and vulnerability were wonderful examples that I got from this person who was a mentor to me for many years and it was very impactful. One day he came to me and said, because he saw that I really enjoy doing educational content, I proved that through my work, we were getting great results with it. We actually built the brand from the ground up just through educational content and just through organic growth in the first four years of the company's existence. So we had a very personal stake in it because we both believed in that and it was bringing in results as well. So he thought if this experience was so transformative for me and so important, I think that you would really benefit from it. I proposed to the CEO that you do the altMBA as well, that the company supports you through it, and then that you will come back, train and kind of coach, and just relay your experience to the other people in the company including the technical team, the sales team that was forming, and so on and so forth. It felt like a big mission, but I was also very excited because we were both diehard Seth Godin fans. His work had influenced the way that we see marketing, the way that we approach it, and the way that we find meaning and reward in it, which is not something that's particularly, let's say indicative of the profession as people see it from the outside. So to me, it was a great opportunity and I said, “yes” immediately. I knew that it would be like a project in itself besides my job, but I was very ready for it. So the three things happened during this experience during this workshop. First of all, something that I saw become a pattern actually while going through the altMBA, is that a lot of people who do it quit their jobs. It's probably not something that you put in the USP for the course. But a lot of people quit their jobs because it just forces you to sit with some very powerful and deep questions about your work and life that you decide to not replace anything, but really shake things from the ground, up. So my manager decided to quit his job while I was doing the altMBA. He decided to leave for another role and go pursue another opportunity. He entrust me with the leadership, with the entire marketing team, which I had done before, but at a smaller scale, I was handling the content team, but not the entire marketing team. Also, it was at a time when the biggest ransomware attack in history had happened. It put entire factories out of business, it took entire companies of flying, it was a big blow, it never had never happened before at that scale and with that impact. Obviously, everyone wanted to buy cybersecurity solutions, all of them at the same time, just to avoid, you know, having their entire production line stop. So all of this, those things kind of merged into one big ball of transformation. What was interesting about it is that ultimately it was such a grounding experience and it was such a maturing step that it helped me navigate all of those transformations, all of those changes, including buying my first apartment, which was another personal challenge that happened at the same time, with a lot more– let's say grace and empathy for myself, for the team, for the CEO, and for everyone involved in this. Somehow, this lens, this approach to work when you're really close to the people that you are working with and this is something that I really appreciate about working with smaller teams and being able to be coached and coach people at the same time and share experiences with peers because we need these three things. This is something that I learned from experiences we need three kinds of people in our lives to make good progress. So we need someone to learn from, we need a teacher, we need peers to share our learnings with, and we need mentees so we can teach them what we're learning. This context at this employer and then this team gave me all of these three roles at the same time, which is why it had such a huge impact for me personally, but then I saw this extended to the team as well because they started to pursue their own goals and be more actively involved. Everyone came together to help the company in this huge growth spurt that was influenced by these external events. So I really think that mentorship is one of the most powerful relationships in our lives when it's not forced, when it's natural when you invest time in it when you're able to make yourself vulnerable, and it earns you relationships that last for life and friendships that carry over through jobs and experiences and just shapes your path. I've seen that happen time and again, and it's one of the most beautiful things. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I'm gonna circle back to one thing that you said about Seth, is that it had a reputation that if you take this program, you may quit your job. It's really funny. I saw Seth speak a long time ago, there were maybe a hundred, and 200 people in the audience. I remember he's usually the best in Q and A, he always has his prepared content, but in Q and A, I feel like you get the best out of Seth. I remember this exchange between someone who was just talking about, “You know what, my company's not really an innovative company, they tend to kind of play catch up. Even when they play catch up, they don't do a great job of it.” So the guys kind of saying like, “How can I change the culture?” And he was in a marketing role. He was probably like a VP of marketing maybe, and Seth starts to deconstruct the situation. After a minute or two, of asking questions and listening, he looks at the guy and goes, “I gotta tell you, why are you still working for this company?” And it just was like this pause, and everyone was like getting lured into this question because he's very good at just kind of saying, “You have to know when to leave something and even if you come here and you look for inspiration or I can help you look at the world in a different way, I can't change a company or the products in that company or the services in the company.” Seth has always been great at– he'll tell you something and then you'll be like, “Of course, that makes perfect sense.” So it's funny that you had that same experience through the reputation of the altMBA and that it connected back to the story when it was the first time I saw Seth. Most people, most speakers like that, come from this position of like, “Oh no, my knowledge will help you fix this. I can solve that problem.” He just kind of goes, “Nope. You've quickly diagnosed this problem and you need to get out of there quickly.” So– 

Andra Zaharia: Yep. He will inspire exploration, exploration, and inquiry, and making that a constant reflection process. This is what actually the altMBA is based on. One of the key– let's say modules –is about sun costs. So it's wonderful that you mentioned this because that's one of the things that really helped me internalize sun cost, I've practiced it in my life, and I saw a huge difference. I realized how much we don't do that, how much we don't realize the cost of not letting go of something, and how much it changes our decision-making as marketers, as people, as managers, and so on. I think it's lovely that things connect. His work is just so clear, there's so much complexity and depth to it, but at the same time, the key themes are always very clear and visible. I just find that amazing to be able to do both of those things. 

Steve Goldhaber: Okay. We're gonna jump into another story and I'm gonna set this story up by saying that, as marketers, we've all had that one piece of content that kind of– for lack of a better word –went viral. I can remember I had done a post on LinkedIn, it was a recap of a conference that I attended and as I was in the conference, this was kind of earlier on before I started doing everything dedicated to content marketing, but I was kinda like, “You know what, I'm gonna go to this conference and I'm gonna take notes in the form of a blog post and then at the end of the conference, I'm gonna publish this post.” I had done it and it was kind of like real-time news-slash-summary notes of this conference and maybe 50 salespeople who worked for that company picked it up, they shared it, and there were like 50,000 views on this piece of content. So we've all had that experience of like, “Wow, this piece of content really, really had an impact and got a lot of traction.” So now is your turn to share the story of about a piece of content that you did that was inspired by a simple question. 

Andra Zaharia: Mm. First of all, I'm a big fan of questions in general and I think that this may be the moment where I realized just how important they are, is if you find the people who really resonate with that topic and who really want, who have skin in the game, and want to answer it. I was browsing through customer questions one day. I used to get a lot of emails from people asking things. Started based on the educational content, which I would put out in a form of courses, blog posts, and so on. We usually got emails that were quite lengthy and quite complex, but this was a very simple email and someone asked, “Okay, I get it. Everyone's trying to do this, but tell me, is internet security, a losing battle?” And to me, that was like, “Wow, there are so many ways to answer this question and there's–

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's a great one. 

Andra Zaharia: –just so much input. It still is, it's an evergreen question. It's still true today. You could ask anyone and it's still kind of a question that inspires debate and a constructive one for the most part, depending on which part of the internet you're looking at. So I decided to do an expert roundup about this because I had built relationships with people in the industry that I knew cared about cybersecurity beyond their jobs. It was part of their identity, they had a personal stake in this, and they were really putting in a lot of time and effort into debating things, finding ways to help others, and finding ways to break through the echo chamber that is cyber security. So I started emailing people the simple question like, “We got this question from a customer and I'd like to answer it with your help.” The response was overwhelming. First of all, one of the 30-plus contributors emailed me an essay of that was like 3000 words in length and he told me– 

Steve Goldhaber: Oh my God

Andra Zaharia: “I know it's too long. I got really excited about the topic. So I will get back to you with a V2 and I will cut this down to something that's more manageable. To me, that was very clear proof that I had struck a nerve, that it was something that people cared personally about. So what I ended up creating from their answers, it's an article that has almost 20,000 words. Even though it is obviously a tiny book, I think that there may be books that are just less voluminous than that. It was one of the most read articles when I last saw its performance and I was able to look up its performance in Google Analytics, it had a time on the page like 15-plus minutes, people spent time with that. 

Steve Goldhaber: Wow. 

Andra Zaharia: Which again is really an outlier that doesn't happen really often. It is a piece of content that I keep going back to and that is a topic that I keep debating and going back to even, I think it's been seven years since I published that, and I still go back to it because it's just become such a staple. All those things are evergreen. All of those perspectives and all of that passion, you can feel the emotion that went into that. The interest, the deep commitment to this topic, and to helping others understand it. So that was honestly one of the projects that is dearest to my heart and I do believe that expert roundups still have a place in many ways in any industry if you do them right and if you really appeal to people's need to truly contribute. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, I think one thing I'll share that I can relate to in this story is so many times, B2B marketers get into the trap of publishing weekly blog posts and they say the blog post is gonna be a 1200-word or 2000-word thing. Neil Patel, who obviously needs no introduction, he's super smart in this space. I was reading a post to his where he essentially said, “Sure, you can, you can post weekly or biweekly. But what you really need to do is put yourself in a position where you create the definitive guide to something and spend, two months, or three months working on one piece. If it's 20,000 words, that's okay. Throughout that 20,000-word piece embed videos, embed other things, and his whole point was if you create a definitive guide to something, there is so much content that gets consumed through Google, and to your point of getting an average duration of 15 minutes, it's crazy. It's unheard of. I wish more of my clients would embrace that they get comfortable with the, “We don't wanna put all our eggs in one basket”-approach, so we're gonna create 20 pieces of content in the quarter. So it's great. There are two things I like about the story. One is like, it starts with the question from a customer, and I think that sometimes as content marketers, we're starved for what we want to talk about. And that's the first point is just to answer your customers' or your client's problems. Those are great places to start. Then the second part, which I really liked about the story was just the outpouring you struck a nerve. I think asking that question is such a great catalyst for something I've listened to it a lot of podcasts by Sean DeSouza and he's written a book or two too, and he's big on questions and his whole take on questions is, by asking a question, it slows the brain down and the brain almost cannot get past it. So for example, I ask you, “What's your favorite color?” and you, in your mind, you've already answered the question, but there's that tension because, I've been asked the question, I haven't shared the answer. I know it's like you can’t undo it. I think whether great questions are in headlines or just thought-provoking pieces to kind of get you started. I love questions. You can't unsee a question. 

Andra Zaharia: That's so true and it makes everything more personal because it makes it yours. It puts some of the responsibility on the person who answers the question. So it's, there's no escaping you can't really back out of the conversation and then say like, “Hey, this is not for me.” Because once you're in it, you're there. You're part of it. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. Awesome. Great story. So we're gonna go jump into another story right now, and this has to do with brand positioning. So tell us about your positioning story. 

Andra Zaharia: This is something that particularly, well, one of the things that I wanted to mention about what you said and the areas that we've glided through until now, is that although I define myself as a content marketer, I think that we are all communication specialists that get to apply what we learn and our, let's say thirst for discovery, and for working with other people in different ways, but it's all the same thing. I don't really believe in these labels because they change from time to time. This is why you wouldn't necessarily go to a content marketer for positioning but actually, I think that content marketers are some of the most connected people and rooted into the reality of industry, especially if they're really passionate about it. So they're able to articulate this. This came, for example, for me, my entire trajectory throughout cybersecurity has always been kind of a red thread connecting everything, which was my interest in the people in the industry, whether they were technical specialists or founders or people in other marketing positions or in product roles and so on and so forth. I'm curious about their conversations. I've followed them. I've learned. I think that half of my knowledge comes from those conversations that they have in public, which I think is a very generous thing to do. So one of the things that you get to do as you watch and take in these conversations and participate in them is that you get to see patterns. One of the patterns that I observed was obviously automation, which is something held as this incredible solution that's going to make all our lives better. But the reality of technology is that you cannot have technology work without people in general. I mean, you can automate some things, but if there's no human to mind the mechanism and keep an eye on it, make sure that it works properly, make sure that they do the their necessary adjustments. Technology does not work by itself. I think that that's a myth that we just accept and that sometimes the media pushes, which is incorrect. I see this as I started working with a company in offensive security, which is a deeply technical area of cybersecurity in general, I saw that most of the companies in that space are pushing for automation and they're just telling you, “We'll replace your entire team. You won't need all these external providers. We’ll just do everything for you, just push a button.” And anyone who knows something or who is interested or cares enough about this space to look at what the work actually involves will know that that's impossible. That is a superficial claim. That is a claim that's very disconnected from the reality of things because offensive security is incredibly complex and it covers so many things from risk management to vulnerability discovery. It just it's hugely complex and only the human mind can navigate that complexity in a way that makes sense and adjusts to each scenario. So looking at this entire thing I wanted to bring in besides the technical proficiency that this client had for their product, I wanted to bring in a human layer because I saw, and I'm a big advocate of treating people with empathy, and bringing technical people's work into the limelight, but not just through benefits and through these big lofty promises, but also through the incredible wisdom that they bring, because these people are usually multidisciplinary, hence, they care about a bunch of things. They're driven by ethical purpose because their skills are like, you can use it for good or bad, but they choose to use it for good. That has a transformative role in the company, in society, in how society shapes technology and vice versa. So I wanted to bring that into the positioning and I kind of tested it with a product launch and I put the emphasis on “Automation is not here to replace you, it's here to help you offload some of the things, but we know that no one can replace you and your expertise.” And I saw that resonate over and over again, we did use our customer development interviews, which I'm a big believer in, and we saw people go through their website, and stop at that particular phrase. I saw them light up, I saw them feel seen, feel recognized, and feel that their work matters because they're usually under high pressure, they're overworked, they never get to feel like the end is in sight because there's always more to do. So it's a never-ending process. When I saw that connection point, I knew that this was something that was worth building on. That's how we made a lot of friends, honestly, in the community and people who know, that there are people behind the screen, behind that company, who really care about them and their work. That kind of connection, I don't think that you can't fake that– either you care or you don't. But unfortunately, well for circumstances that we all know internal, external, and so on. There's not a lot of room for this kind of connection in marketing and cybersecurity. Because people don't make room for it and don't prioritize it, and I think that that's one of the biggest pitfalls and one of the biggest missed opportunities in this space. I hope that this changes. There are a couple of marketers doing a good job at this space and I hope to see more of them. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's really good. It's interesting. I like how you said, most content marketers, don't play in the positioning worlds, but it's fun to see how the framing of a certain thing helps make or break how people engage on it or not. I think that it's a great insight that while the rest of the automation world is all about the simplicity of pressing a button, the truth that you discovered was essentially just like, this is a tool that can help you, it's not to replace you, and it's not gonna do too much. I really like that. Okay. We're gonna jump into the final story. It has to do with relevance, such a powerful word, relevance. So, tell us about relevance as it relates to content marketing. 

Andra Zaharia: I think that this can be a touchy topic.I wish we could talk about it at length, in terms of relevance, because I think that there's a lack of it sometimes in the content marketing world. But one of the interesting things about being a content marketer in cybersecurity is that the industry is so technical that you can really exaggerate your way through it. So you can’t really fabricate things because technical people will see through you immediately. Their bullshit radar is extremely powerful and it's set to do max, all the time. and this applies to journalists in this space too, because they're usually fairly technical people, they develop a lot of expertise as they work in this industry because you can't really write about things that you don't understand or haven't tried yourself, which you think is one of the beautiful things about being in content marketing in cybersecurity. One of the things was this powerful experience was that I created so we had a lot of cybersecurity alerts in a time when cybersecurity wasn't really part of mainstream conversation. It wasn't part of mainstream media, but this was so big, it was a type of malicious software that infected android phones. It was the first time that it was so widespread that it had spread to hundreds of millions of devices in just a few days. So it was huge news and the research team and the company that I worked for had discovered this, and I had previous relationships with journalists in the space, trying to be helpful to them, this felt like something that was really relevant to talk about. So I prepared brief, I explained to give them, proof of research, screenshots, and everything. Because again, that's the beauty of cybersecurity. You either have the proof or you don't, it's very pragmatic and I love that. So I talked to a couple of my media contacts and I told them about the news and they picked up on it. There were smaller outlets at the time, small to medium outlets. When I woke up the next day, everything had kind of snowballed in the sense that The Verge had picked up that bit of news, PC Mag, the BBC, and Tech French. So, it kind of snowballed and went from the mainstream conversation in just in the cybersecurity niche, went into the tech world, and then it overflowed into mainstream media, which now happens a lot more frequently. Now cybersecurity is kind of part of the regular news cycle. But that was very unusual at the time, we were a small company, so it wasn't like one of the big top five tech players in the world. What we got from this was over 360 media mentions in seven days, which was something that you cannot replicate. It was a mix of relevance, being helpful, giving something that could be proven to your media partners, and just helping them do their job in a way that was truly helpful for their audiences. I always help clients that I work with and my previous employers as well, you can fabricate this. You can't make this up. You can't force topics into the spotlight. If you have something that's really good, that is really helpful, that really has a stake for multiple people, then it's going to feel natural. You're going to naturally be able to become part of the news cycle. If not, you're just going to struggle like carrying a big boulder up the hill. 

Steve Goldhaber: Nice. All right. I like that story. We have wrapped up the storytelling part of the podcast. Now we're gonna dive in to just get to know a little bit about you. I've been holding back the questions on cybersecurity for this section because they're always so interesting. I have a client who is in the cybersecurity space and I'm fascinated by that world. The things that I learn in that world amaze me sometimes. It's not even the things that like make the media, it's the things that did not make the media because things were implemented. It's almost like diffusing of all these bombs every day. No one will really know about it unless it's a client thing. So my first question is, we don't do brand names or anything like that…

Andra Zaharia: Mm-hmm

Steve Goldhaber: –but maybe share one or two stories around what's the craziest thing you've seen in the cyberspace? Whether if it was an attack, if it was against a brand or a certain government, what's a story that just stands out where you're like, “I can't believe that happened.”

Andra Zaharia: Unfortunately, there is a lot to choose from. The pool of examples has become really large in terms of complexity, in terms of geopolitical implications, in terms of the threatening the stability of the world. We don’t use to read about these things in sci-fi books and see them on sci-fi TV shows, but I guess that one of the most important stories, this kind of shaped the world of cybersecurity in general is TaxNet. Which is a type of malware that was designed to infiltrate the Iran’s nuclear program. It basically damaged the coolers in their plant where they enriched uranium. First of all, it is an entire feat to get malicious software in a nuclear plant that is designed to be completely off the grid and completely out, aligning disconnected for obvious reasons. Second of all, the geopolitical implications were absolutely massive. This was kind of a turning point in the industry because it became about cyber warfare. It reconnected cybersecurity to its roots, which are military, of course, because that's how cybersecurity came to be. But it also showed the extremely damaging potential that it has on a huge scale. One of the other things that happened in the industry that was a bit more difficult for outsiders to understand was that at some point, a group of malicious hackers leaked onto the internet. Hacking tools that were used by the use go government, and basically they were free to use by anyone. That opened up tons of vulnerabilities and security issues and software that's used by companies across the world for malicious exploitation. We're talking about really high stake things, because there are types of software that are really what spread that companies depend on. Like, I can imagine how the financial world exists without Excel, for example, and again, it's not an overstatement in three-plus years, it became the backbone of the financial system and so many others that’s reported. I think that we've gotten so used to all of these layers and we believe that technology is inherently safe to use, which sometimes is, but we've taken a lot of responsibility away from people.Now we're trying to get them to be interested again in assuming or taking on a bit of that responsibility. Big cybersecurity events, let's call them such as this, really show real-world impact, because again, there's one of the biggest challenges in being a communicator in the cybersecurity industry is that you have to get people to connect emotionally to the potential consequences. Getting people to act proactively we know is not that easy medicine has been trying to do it for so many years. To some extent, it has succeeded, but not as much as we'd like to. Cybersecurity is the same, the use case is completely different. So I think that, yep, these examples can be powerful to show what the real-life consequences of these things are and get us to take things seriously and not just see it as something that's very separated from us, that's very removed from our lives. It is not. We wouldn't be able to function without it. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. I'm gonna ask this next question has more of a marketing kind of origin story. So when was it that you, that you kind of first said, “You know what, marketing's my thing. I love it. That's my career.” When did you discover that? 

Andra Zaharia: Actually I have a background, so I graduated from the university where I studied communication. I didn't study marketing at the university. Well, studied some marketing concepts, but it was mostly PR and communication. I just naturally went on to work with a local entrepreneur who was already kind of doing digital campaigns. This was in 2009, so that was really the beginning and a very kind of innocent stage of Facebook and other social media platforms. It was a different time. It was a completely different time. I got to work on that specifically because I had created a personal blog and I had started to become an active member of the local online community, which was again, budding and very new. The choice was kind of natural and it evolved in time. I was fascinated by the intersections of people in technology and how we influence each other in terms of behavior, in terms of how we see the world, and how that affects entire decision-making. I wanted to be able to work with that and I wanted to be able to do something good with that because I was so passionate about technology that I found more time to understand it than others. This is kind of a learning cycle that I kept feeding and repeating, and that now I apply in cybersecurity and it hasn't changed much except for the type of concepts that I deal with and the audiences that I connect to. 

Steve Goldhaber: Here's my next thought I would like to kind of be reflective when I talk to all these marketers on the podcast. What is it that you can look back on now where you may be in your first year that you were doing marketing, you thought, “This is it, this is the best way to do it. I've got all this confidence.” But now years forward you go, “Oh my God, I was so off. That was not the right path to be down.” What comes to your mind? 

Andra Zaharia: For me, it was quite the opposite experience. I was not confident. I was the opposite of confident for the longest time. So it was really a struggle for me to not feel like an imposter all the time. When working with companies with technical depth, with technical people who only seemed to be more rooted in their specific niches and specialties. So if I was able to do that, I would probably focus on kind of a mindset aspect and just urge myself to be gentler on myself, because I was so hard on myself, in my twenties that I burned out three times. That really took a toll on me. I connected my identity so much to my work that I didn't know how to kind of feed my essential human needs for connection, for growth and diversity. I did it all through my work and that obviously led to burnout and exhaustion and things like that. So I would really focus on being gentler to myself because I knew that, I could never end up on the other side of the spectrum where I become really lazy and not interested in my work. I would just basically just move the toggle a bit to the middle ground. I see this a lot in young people nowadays as well, that I have the opportunity and privilege to mentor and I try to do the same for them. I try to help them kind of manage their energy and enthusiasm. So it nurtures them and doesn't actually deplete them.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Interesting. All right. My final question for you is let's say that there's someone, on day one of their marketing career within cyberspace, what's the advice that you would give to them? Looking at that they have 20, 30 years ahead of them? What would you advise them on? 

Andra Zaharia: Try to ask yourself, what part of your beliefs about life, about work, about your personal goals, align with the kind of work that you want to do? Are you an anxious person that needs to plan ahead and needs to have a lot of structure? How can you use that to make your work easier, to make your work of understanding this industry easier, and to learn about it? I feel like the people who I saw progress in this industry, both on the technical side and marketing roles, and any roles in general were the ones who found a personal mission in contributing to cybersecurity because one of the rewarding things about this industry is that it gives you an opportunity to do that. It gives you an opportunity to do meaningful work that actually makes a difference in the real world and has a palpable effect on people, even though, as you mentioned, that effect is that nothing happens, that nothing bad happens. But I think that that's one of the most powerful things, because when you find that anchor when you put some skin in the game, then that learning curve becomes easier. It becomes easier to follow, connect with people, follow conversations, find your information sources, find your inspiration, advocate for things with your manager, with your CEO, and to make progress. Everything becomes easier because you have such a powerful incentive that's part of you. And again, I'm not advocating for making it your entire identity, but it is about finding that personal alignment, because if there's conflict there, if you're trying to will yourself to love it, if you're trying to will yourself to do your job, that's not going to work in the long run. I've seen great people, I've hired great people who just became disinterested in the industry, and although they were doing a good job, their heart wasn't in it. I hated to see them change their minds, but it happens. The people who have persisted and are determined to build something and make a dent in the space, are the ones who found this very personal goal and whose values really clicked with the ones in the industry. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. Good advice. Well, Andra, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed your stories. If anyone wants to get in touch with you, should they go to LinkedIn? Should they go to a website? What's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Andra Zaharia: Thank you, Steve, for allowing me to share these stories and for inspiring such wonderful connections, and for looking for those triggers that really make things personal and very kind of intense. You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Twitter, and I also have a personal website. Just my name.com, so, andrazaharia.com. But yeah, the easiest way, Twitter, LinkedIn, that's where I hang out. If you're interested in the cybersecurity industry, I would love to talk to you, especially if you're interested in communication roles. I have a great list of people to follow in this space on Twitter, which you can use anytime to see kind of what it looks like, what people are talking about, and what kind of people are on there.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. Awesome. Well, that's all for the show today. Thanks again for joining us and we will catch you next time. See you, everyone. Bye-bye.