User Guide v2.7: Adam Arellano

Background

At a previous company, Binti, it was expected that every employee write a user guide to help others interact, work with, and give feedback to new team members. I found the practice super helpful when learning about a big team, but challenging to write about myself in a self-reflective and transparent way. Your user guide should shift and adjust as you, your role, and your internal workings shift and grow. Here is my user guide, I hope you enjoy it, and I can’t wait to read yours!

Basics

Adam Ross Arellano

Pronouns: He/They (I am not at all masculine internally but I understand how hard it is to look at me and think anything besides “him” so I don’t insist on gender neutral language in my direction. I’m non-binary and still figuring out what that means to me. The closest I can get to a shorthand explanation: David Bowie but Thicc. Happy to talk about it, just ask!)

Current location: Charlotte, NC

Spouse: Jessica (aka boss lady)

Kids: a LOT… six kids from age 8 to 22 years old

Working Hours:

Monday to Friday 1000 to 1800 (10am to 6pm)

*Tuesday to Thursday? 0500 to 0900 (5am to 9am) by appointment, see “Ethics” below

If you are ever in doubt if I am available just message me!

Communicating With Me

Please do:

• Reach out freely, I don’t pay much attention to title or position, just that your voice and opinion matter. If you wonder if something is worth bringing to me, please stop it. Just message me via Slack. I promise not to bite or bark. If something is urgent and I don’t respond via Slack, text me directly, again I always prefer communication and over communication and would be sad if someone held back or felt uncomfortable messaging me
• Get on my calendar for both important and unimportant things. I want to hear about your day, or something eating at your brain, or a conundrum you’re in, or just what you think should change.
• Complain at me directly. Seriously. Especially if it’s something I personally did or caused or let happen. I need to know and I’ll always be grateful for your honesty.

Please don’t:

• call me sir… if it's part of your normal speech patterns (looking at you southerners!) I get it but I’ve never felt comfortable with it
• Don’t hold on to feedback or corrections when you feel the need to speak up. I thrive on tough feedback and will respect you immensely for bringing things to my attention.
• Don’t ever be afraid to remind me if I owe you an answer or action! Just assume I need your prodding to get something you need. I’ll try my best to not need it, but you’ll always be thanked for reminding me.

My Working Style and Superpower(s)

• I believe very strongly in the inverted leadership pyramid, wherein the leader sits on the bottom and their main role is to support and enable those who “work for.” This means that my first priority is making sure that my team is well informed, has clear priorities, and open paths to communicate as needed. If at any time, you feel like these priorities aren’t being met, please let me know!
• My superpower is understanding complex problems/situations and finding viable solutions/paths. In practice this means that I love doing “pairing sessions” where I sit with someone facing a complex situation or problem and talk through the best next steps or solutions. As such, if you are ever in a bind I am always available to talk through tough situations!
• I use exclamation points too much!
• Finding an 80% solution now is better than a 100% solution a day too late. In other words, I rarely will spend time over-analyzing a situation to the point of exhaustion when time is short. This necessarily means that, in the absence of 100% surety, mistakes can be made (see next point).
• I embrace risk and failure as necessary tools for growth! I talk about my own failures (it's a long and often hilarious list) a lot and celebrate and reward risks that end in failure on my teams.
• I don’t take myself too seriously, and I will be the first to point out my mistakes and weaknesses publicly.

Ethical Considerations

Working Hours

• If I have team members, customers, or vendors in different time zones, I make myself available at 0500 (5am) on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I also am available Sunday mornings for anyone who's week starts on Sunday morning (for example those in Israel).?
• Why is this in the Ethics section? Glad you asked. Work-life balance for everyone is important to me. I believe it is unethical to zealously guard one’s own work-life balance at the expense of others. As such, if I have anyone that interacts with me regularly who is in a different time zone, I make sure to be available during their working hours at least half of the days I work to balance the the time we mutually need to spend together.

If you:?

• 1. Work for me
• 2. Read this and think to yourself “wait, Adam doesn’t do this for us”
• 3. Immediately go to the nearest and largest public forum (yes I said public) we share and call me out RIGHT NOW!

Conflicts of Interest

Here I will list the various companies and organizations that I have some kind of financial, equity, or blood relationship with in order to be transparent about where conflicts of interest may arise. This isn’t a very common thing to do in the security space, but my personal values and reputation seldom follow convention.

• Harness via Traceable by Harness Field Chief Technology Officer - During my time at PayPal, I was a customer and consumer of Traceable. I also became friends with the co-founder and CTO, a dynamic and genuinely good person with a long track record of successful technology companies. As the Field CTO, I am focused on helping customers find value in the platform, shaping the future of Traceable, and educating the industry on API security. I won’t go into the many reasons I believe in both the platform and the people at Traceable, it’s enough to say that I have seen first hand that Traceable is going to solve a LOT of the most pressing problems in technology today. Recently Traceable merged with Harness and we are so excited to be on this journey!
• The Ka-Tet Group- Founder and Lead Consultant to Non-Profits?- This is my personal consulting LLC I use to advise and assist non-profits with their security programs. Generally I won’t talk about these engagements. Yes it is a Stephen King Dark Tower reference, and no I don’t have permission to use the name. That is cool with me cause if one day I or the company become well known enough that Mr. King or his lawyers send me a cease and desist letter that will be exactly one more letter from Stephen King than I have right now, so win/win!
• Team8- Villager- Team8 is an Israel based VC fund I have benefited from since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Among other things they focus on cybersecurity startups and developing new companies based on the feedback they get from “The Village.” There are roughly 450 villagers as I write this, composed of CSO, CISO, and Deputy CISO’s that form a collective hive mind and mutually support each other.
• Ionix- Strategic Advisor- I met the Ionix team while at the 2024 Team8 CISO Village in the hills surrounding Santa Cruz, CA. I spent a lot of the week with the CEO who, in addition to being a humble and amazing human, has a vision for the company I really believe in. Earlier this year he invited me to become an advisor and I have been working with them since. The Ionix approach to holistic alerting that actually provides actionable insights to security operations teams is uniquely powerful and positioned to change the space.

Random Things

• Hobbies- driving kids to places like endlessly, reading science fiction, Starfield (XBox), attempting to work out while the boss lady (see above) does it better, swimming, writing articles
• Fav Books- I listed these out here, look for the titles and reasons in the comments
• Things you can ask me about if you want to get me talking for hours on end- Afghan War, Iraq War, pacifism, why EVERYONE needs a therapist, mental health, social work, foster care and adoption, Christopher Nolan films, working in a kitchen, Bolivia, leadership theory, Community Colleges
• Here are some things I felt so strongly about I wrote articles