Empowering Consumers in Cybersecurity: Insights from Real Defense’s Gary Guseinov

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. I am really happy to be joined by my next guest.

His name is Gary Goov. Gary is the CEO of a company called Real Defense. And for those who are interested, the URL is real Defend.

That's R-E-A-L-D-E-F-E-N se. So hopefully you got that, but it'll probably be on the lower third of your screen. Anyway, you can see it there.

Gary, welcome to Text Trunk tv. It's great to have you on here. Thanks.

So having me, Alex. Um, Gary, before we jump into Real defense and what it's about and so forth, let's, I always like to give you as a sense of who's, who's, who they're listening to. So if you don't mind, give us a little bit of your background.

Sure. So I, I'm the CEO co-founder of Real Defense, uh, founded the company in 2017. We are a, um, a, a platform where we acquire, uh, small and cybersecurity companies in the consumer privacy and security space.

We've done six acquisitions. We're targeting wine acquisition and, uh, possibly two acquisitions next year. We, uh, uh, funded the company with private equity capital, um, uh, Corbell Capital's, our lead investor.

Prior to this, I was involved with many different startups. One of the most, probably relevant to, to the cybersecurity was a company called Cyber Defender, uh, at the founder of that company in 2004. And then I was also part of the team of Anchor Free Hotspot Shield, which is the biggest, uh, VPN product in the world with, uh, 600 million users around the world.

And so a lot of experience in cybersecurity. Um, real defense, uh, has two parts of business. One is direct to consumer, and the other one where we license our technology stack to other cybersecurity companies.

Currently, most cybersecurity companies use our technology around the world. Very cool. So, Gary, I've been in cyber myself for about 30 years now.

Started a few, uh, venture backed companies in the space. I've been covering it here for 10 plus years. Um, what, you know, after leaving your last company, you know, no one wakes up in the morning and says, oh, I feel like starting a company today.

Right? There's always something driving us. There's a passion to do something.

What was the passion with Real Defense? Well, the passion is, is that, uh, the consumer, uh, has less choices today when it comes to cybersecurity products. And there was a time where there were a lot of free tools and free tools are pretty good, uh, 10, 15 years ago.

And now those free tools are not as good or they just don't exist anymore. There's been a lot of consolidation. Look at, uh, Norton of Austin and, and others, uh, uh, companies that have been acquired and absorbed.

And so there are list choices. There's a lot more need today. Uh, obviously with AI and other emergent threats, and there are more consumers connected to high speed internet.

You've got, um, pretty much internet all over the world and, and not a single consumer. No matter what your demographic, uh, uh, geographic profile is, you have access to internet. And so that creates opportunities for crime.

Um, financial services are mostly conducted on devices now and versus doing it in person. And so you've got the significant thread out there that's, that's continuing to become bigger. And the other thing is assets are now digitized.

So most of your, uh, valuables are now online and they're on your phone. And so how do you control that? How do you manage it?

There are tools for that, and there's lots of opportunities to create security layer that the enterprises have, but consumers don't. Excellent. And so let, let's jump into real defense then and, and talk a little bit about, you know, what, what kind of security tools, let's stick right now for the consumer piece of it.

What tools is it giving consumers to help keep them secure? Sure. So our, our number one flagship product is a product called System Mechanic for Iola.

It's a product that's been around for about 20 years. We acquired a company in 2020, and our goal is to build on top of their success. We build tools that optimize your device.

We optimize for speed, efficiency, productivity, and security and privacy. And so we have PhDs, we have scientists that, that make your Windows device just a lot more secure and more productive. And so we've built various different, uh, uh, uh, technologies that we've patented, uh, and, and, and, uh, and secured that are unique in the marketplace.

And they, we do all kinds of things like anti fingerprinting technologies. We, uh, do deep packet analysis. We block you from unwanted content.

We, uh, reprioritize applications on your device so that your computer's faster with all kinds of things. It's, it's, it's a whole list of features and capabilities that you can market. It's kind of an endpoint security suite that includes optimization, tune up, hardening, and then monitoring.

It sounds like monitoring on top of that. That's right. And, and we give you the controls.

So, um, some of our users are, are like the, what we call prosumers, who like to customize their experience and they, and they go really deep in the application and they optimize their CPU, the optimized their hard drive, and there's lots of tools within the application to do that. Very good. And now, um, let me, let me turn to the sort of the OEM side of the house or you know, your channel if you will.

Yep. Companies are taking the real defense, uh, platform and white labeling it or building on it, or what exactly are they doing? Yeah, it's a good question.

Uh, and, and sometimes it's very difficult to explain because our, our solution is not, uh, a pure kind of reseller channel where somebody takes our product, puts a, their brand on it, then goes to market. We do go, we do deeper integration. We are, uh, really good on creating demand from consumers.

We have a, a metric, um, um, diagnostic where we look at your device and see what's wrong with it. And we can deliver a message based on the telemetry data that we have and tell you when you need a product at the time when you need it. So it's different than going to market with email and discounts and, you know, creating demand from, uh, perception and, uh, and, and, and, and values for creation.

We'd rather tell you whether there's something wrong in your device at the time when something actually is wrong. So for example, A VPN, uh, if you wanna market a VPN to a company, to a person that is traveling, well that's a good time to do it because they'll be connecting to public wifi networks. So that is a good time to sell A VPN If they're at home and they're using the internet, there's not as much need for A VPN as there would be if you're traveling.

So just, just as an example, uh, of how we market. And so we look at the telemetric data that says, okay, this is a V vpn or this is a wifi connection that's new that hasn't been, never been accessed. This is a time to sell you VPN.

Um, same thing with our optimization. We see that something's wrong with the hard drive. We see that something's wrong with certain applications in your device and you getting errors.

We notify you of those errors and then we can sell you a product that you need for that particular problem. Excellent. Excellent.

Um, hey Gary, what, what make us smart about SMART Scan, what exactly is that? So it's, it's actually what I just explained. The SMART Scan technology is a layer, uh, of, of, of, of business rules telemetry and a, the messaging system that tells, uh, that our partner's license and they integrate it into their products.

So for instance, let's say you're antivirus company and you want to sell products that you currently don't have and you want to sell our products, and you want to create demand from your consumers for these products, you will integrate SMART Scan into your existing products, and SMART scan would analyze the device and will present various different solutions at the time when the consumer needs it the most. And so that's what Smarts Scan does. It analyzes, it collects telemetry data and, and, and it collects it in a very private manner.

It doesn't send the data back to anybody. It just looks at it and analyzes it and then presents through our messaging system a, uh, notification that says, Hey, your computer has these issues, you need to take action. And that action doesn't necessarily mean you need to buy anything.

It may mean that you need to download another free application to deal with your issue. It could mean it links to a video. It could, it could link to a FAQ page.

It doesn't necessarily mean you're buying something, but there's a, uh, uh, intelligent way through SMART Scan to deliver these messages efficiently, quickly. The integration for a partner is weeks and not months. Um, there are lots of benefits to the partner for using our SMART scan.

And by the way, um, Don Dict dictate my work for it. It's been, uh, deployed on dozens to dozens of companies, um, in the space. Hundreds of millions of devices have had SMART Scan installed.

Uh, in terms of revenue last year, our partners generated over a hundred million in a RR just through SMART scan. Wow. Yeah.

Very Cool. What about the SMART scan prepay fund? Yeah, so, uh, one of the, uh, the, the opportunities we're presenting to the market is companies that want to integrate Smarts scan, but not sure about it, don't understand it, uh, are not convinced with the unit economics.

We have money that we've allocated towards these projects and we're able to prepay for, uh, the potential revenue share so that the partner has zero risk going into this integration project. And, and that is, I I'm assuming the privacy first SDK is what they use to integrate SMART scan into their own stack into their own products? Yes.

So, uh, some of our partners have expressed concern that, hey, you're a a a different company. I'm not gonna collect data, hand it to you. Then you're gonna act on that data.

And we said, absolutely. That's, that's a legitimate concern. We don't want any data from your consumer.

That data that we're collecting stays on the device and we're not collecting any data. It's the application that's collecting the data to act on that data. So that tele, we have to have telemetry to understand what's going on with the device.

And that telemetry is not associated with any PII or user data. It doesn't, user data is actually irrelevant. It's the device data that we care about, and that device data never travels outside of that device.

It stays on the device. Excellent, excellent. Um, and Gary, what, you know, what you mentioned, you know, tremendous uptick in, in, uh, uptake in the channel, a hundred million dollars plus worth of business coming out of that for channel partners.

Yeah. Um, my experience is, you know, oftentimes the end users can, the end user consumers either don't realize or don't value, if you will, the, their privacy. Right?

Right. Until, until something goes wrong, then everybody's yelling and screaming about it. Right.

How do you, excuse me, how do you communicate with these end users, letting them know, Hey, this is important. We're here doing this because this is important to you. For you, You know this, that's a great question.

Uh, you can't over communicate some of this stuff because it, if you did, you, they'll be overwhelmed and they won't do anything. It's analysis paralysis. You give a bunch of information and no one's gonna act on it.

And so we do it in little fragments, and we do it in, in subtle ways where we remind you and guide you and tell you where you should look to, to make your device more private. But it really comes down to you as an individual, because if you're a gamer, you may want certain settings a certain way, and then who's, uh, and someone who's not a gamer, who's a stock trader, may want completely different settings. And there are some pri we're trying to mitigate the privacy, not block all, uh, applications from working.

That's not, that's not the goal of the applic, the, our products on the goal of the company, the goal is to give you controls. So if you're traveling, you may want certain controls in place. If you're at a public environment, you want certain controls.

If you're gaming, you want certain controls, different controls than, than than people that use the computer for different, different applications work or, or gaming, whatever. And so, um, if you look at how you're tracked, if you are shopping online, you, you want to be tracked because you want the shopping experience to be efficient. In other words, you're seeing ads that are relevant to what you're looking for.

You, you're seeing, uh, uh, you know, shopping sites like Amazon giving you the right, uh, recommendations. So, but when you're not shopping and you're doing some per, per, like to say you're working in your computer, then you don't, you don't want certain type of targeting. You don't want to be tracked a certain way.

So you may wanna toggle between lots of privacy to little privacy, no privacy. And that, that, you know, variability of how you secure yourself online is what we provide. Excellent.

Gary End users, now, they heard this, they said, geez, I really should have that, or, I really need that. What's, what's their best on-ramp to, to getting real defense? Sure.

So Real Defense is a holding company. com. com.

You can go to Super anti spyware, which is, um, a, a very good anti spyware tool. It's been around for about 20 years. com, very obvious and logical domain.

And, uh, we provide, uh, human and AI enabled support there. So for any product, any device, any operating system, uh, any software application, which you can't get anywhere else, if you wanted to go and get support for just Microsoft products, you can do that, but they're not gonna support other products that are not Microsoft. And so we support all brands, all products, doesn't matter what device.

Doesn't matter when you bought it. Doesn't matter how you got it, it it, we will help you with your technical issue, the amount of lab. Excellent.

And that's something that's needed out there. Hey Gary. Excellent.

Thanks for being on Tech Drunk tv. Appreciate it. And, uh, come back soon and keep us posted.

In the meantime. Good luck though, with everything going on at Real Defense. Alan, thank you for having me.

It, this was great. Thank You. Pleasure all.

We're gonna take a break here on Text Trunk tv. We'll be back in just a moment.