Aaron Warner
Ep. 5 — A Dangerous Biker Bar Encounter Teaches a Teenage Musician a Lesson for the Boardroom / Aaron Warner, Founder and CEO, ProCircular In this episode, Aaron Warner, Founder and CEO of ProCircular describes how he and his teen metal band inadvertently provoked a bunch of drunk bikers to violence with an ill-chosen song. Warner shares how the band defused the scary stand-off and how the decision they made in the face of danger taught them an invaluable lesson on what it takes to succeed in the corporate world and in life. And he describes what that experience taught him about risk management and how it has helped shape his career in cyber security. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra: Hello and welcome to When it Mattered. I'm your host, Chitra Ragavan. I'm also the founder and CEO of Goodstory Consulting, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. Chitra: On this weekly podcast, we invite leaders from around the world to share one personal story that changed the course of their life and work and how they lead and deal with adversity. Chitra: Through these stories, we take you behind the scenes to get an inside perspective of some of the most eventful moments of our time. Chitra: On this episode we will be talking to Aaron Warner, the Founder and CEO of ProCircular. The Iowa-based cyber security firm helps companies confidently manage their cybersecurity risks. Aaron started ProCircular after a 22-year background as a CIO and CTO in the biotech world. Chitra: Aaron, welcome to the podcast. Aaron: Thank you, Chitra. Chitra: You have a really fun job. Basically, companies pay you to hack into their systems so that you can show them the holes in their security fabric and then you help patch up those holes. It's a bit of an edgy counterculture type of job. How did you get into it? Aaron: That's a good question, Chitra. I actually come from a very academic family. There are a number of different people in our family that have PhDs and this, that and the other thing. Aaron: My grandfather actually was one of the people who was involved in creating standardized testing at the University of Iowa, so the work that they did led to things like the SAT and the ACT. Aaron: I actually went sort of a different direction. I spent a lot of time as a kid on my Commodore 64. I never really went the academic direction. In fact, the fact that I don't have my doctorate, my grandfather sort of went to his grave disappointed about. Aaron: I was always interested in computing. I'm always interested in music. Ended up in high school playing in a metal band, actually. Found ourselves as the sort of house band for a biker bar before bikers were all lawyers and hedge fund managers. It led to some really interesting situations. I learned a lot from some of those experiences. Chitra: Tell us about, what was your band called, first of all, and what were some of the experiences you had, and what convinced you to create a metal band of all things? Aaron: The naming of the band actually was one of the things that I've carried into business world and that's a really bad name, if you don't think it through, can follow you for the rest of your career. Aaron: So our band was called Noise Ordinance. The group actually went a variety of different directions. My guitar player's now the president at a global biotech firm, drummer is a professor of optometry, other guitar player works for a fairly large food organization on the East Coast, and our bass player went on to the Marines and then ended up working in the defense intelligence world. So they're pretty nontraditional approach, our band. Aaron: So Noise Ordinance, we were this house band at a bar in a very small town in Riverside, Iowa, called the Iron Horse. The first night that we played, I was 16 years old. I don't know what my parents were thinking,