This Career Mistake Slows Many Cybersecurity Professionals Down | Root To CISO Podcast

What does it really take to become a CISO?

In this episode of the Root to CISO Podcast (Season 3), we sit down with Jenai Marinkovic, a cybersecurity leader with over 25 years of experience, vCISO at our company, Tiro Security & CEO, GRCIE. Jenai, breaks down the reality behind building a career in cybersecurity leadership.

She shares how she entered cybersecurity in the early days of the internet and worked her way through nearly every role in the industry, from engineering and architecture to investigations, leadership, and eventually CISO-level responsibility.

We dive into:

•  How to transition from individual contributor → team lead → manager → director
•  The biggest mistakes leaders make (and what it actually takes to grow) 
•  Why understanding the business matters more than technical skills
•  The challenge of letting go and leading through others
•  Why linear career paths can limit your growth

If you're trying to break into cybersecurity, move into leadership, or become a CISO, this episode gives you a real, unfiltered look at the journey.

🎧 Part 1 of 2 — Part 2 coming next week

#RootToCISO #Cybersecurity #Leadership #CareerSuccess

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hi, and welcome to the Root to CISO podcast. It's me, Kris Rides. I'm gonna be your host and I'm gonna be chatting to seasoned chief information security officers about their career journeys. We're gonna be unencrypting their real life stories and searching for the hidden keys to help you fast track your cybersecurity career.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 0:21

Hi, everybody. We're at Season 3 of the Root to CISO podcast. This is so exciting, and who better to start Season 3 than probably one of my oldest friends in the industry, Janaya Marinkovich. Somebody that we've placed as a CISO through Tiro Security, somebody that's been our virtual CISO on our consulting side for Tiro Security, and somebody that we even got together and created a nonprofit as well. So I'm so excited to have you here. I know you've done the little Byte Sized episodes, but it's so good to actually sit down and talk through your career, 'cause I know I've got a good understanding of it, but I bet there's loads I don't know. I'm just excited to have you on here

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 1:07

Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. I'm super ecstatic

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 1:11

So let's start by, can you let everybody know a little bit of your background and what you're up to currently, and then we're gonna dive right back after that

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 1:18

Sure. Again, my name is Junaid Marinkovich, and I am the CEO and co-founder of GRACEI, which is the for Intelligent Ecosystems Foundation.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 1:30

Whoop.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 1:31

And we are a nonprofit, as Kris had mentioned, that was established to help train people from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities into the world of cybersecurity, GRC, and artificial intelligence. And we've been around since about 2020. In terms of me, I have wow, over 25 years of experience in cybersecurity. I started in the late '90s, like at the birth of the consumer internet. So it's been just this joy seeing the way that the industry has evolved over time. I've pretty much held almost every single role within the industry from architecture to engineering, to testing and assessment, to digital forensics, investigations, you name it. And then in terms of leadership roles I would say that half of my career has been in, in leadership roles.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 2:22

Am- amazing. I know this is gonna be such a fun conversation. I'm excited to, to have it. Let's go back, right the way back to school and then first job from there. Where did you start?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 2:33

Sure. So I actually went to school for chemistry and chemical engineering, and I'd actually wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a forensic pathologist. But come to find out I was allergic to a lot of different types of antibiotics. I

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 2:47

Oh, no.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 2:49

know. So that wasn't gonna work. And it was interesting. I was at Borders bookstore and for those of you guys who remember, there was a magazine called "2600." And I had seen that magazine and I looked at it and I was like, "You know what? This is what I wanna do." And so I went to my dad, who was in law enforcement, and I was like, "Daddy, I wanna be a hacker."

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 3:09

How did that go down?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 3:10

it was fine. He was fine. He actually put me in contact with some people, and then from there I met other people and so I, I got to start learning some of the fundamentals of cybersecurity. They started me out with e- this was when Linux, like with the first version, first kernel, had come out. And so we kinda started there. And my first security job was out in Palo Alto with a company called Kroll O'Gara. And Kroll was the armored car division and the... I'm sorry Kroll was the international investigation side and the O'Garas were the armored car division. And for that worked on a website called Packet Storm and had the opportunity to work with some really awesome people and in terms of both doing cybersecurity consulting as well as running the website

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 3:55

Ama- and did you, so was that your first job out of college, or did you do something before you got into that sort of security side?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 4:03

That's a good question. I would say that was my first legitimate job outside of college, so I think, we all have lots and lots of different kind of side hustles and so forth, but the real first job would've been that one

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 4:15

And so how long were you there for?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 4:17

I was there for about a year, and then after that I transitioned from they became a company called Securifi and then moved into more product security from there, from the consulting. And then after there, I went to Electronic Arts and I had the opportunity to be a an engineer and then a team lead for their security team, their cybersecurity team. And once I left Electronic Arts then I transferred to Southern California and I started to work for a company called Beckman Coulter. And Beckman Coulter is a biomedical manufacturing company. And so anybody in, in medical certainly knows who Beckman Coulter was, and that was the first time I had the opportunity to start designing security into production lines and got to establish the security capability from there. Once I left Beckman Coulter, then I went to go work for a company called Zenith Insurance. And Zenith Insurance is a workman's comp company. And this was really interesting because it was the first time I had a chance to do what's called converged security. And converged security is digital security physical security, as well as crisis management. So I got to do all of the normal things that you would do in terms of building out a security capability, but I also managed their guard forces, and so that was 18 guard forces that were distributed across the country. I got the chance to install and manage all of their physical security systems. I got to be responsible for all of the training not only for the workforce the security workforce, but also for the generalized workforce as well. And then crisis management. So anytime we were dealing with any large scale crises I was responsible for managing that. After Beckman Coulter, then I worked at DirecTV. so with DirecTV, I headed up their security program for almost eight years, I believe.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 6:08

Yeah. And that's, I think we- that's when I think we met back then, right? It was DIRECTV time. I was in Santa Monica, and you guys were down El Segundo, right? Down the road.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 6:17

El Segundo right there

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 6:18

Yeah.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 6:19

on the runway.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 6:20

Yeah, I remember. Look, before we talk about DIRECTV, I wanna go back. So you were in, you ended up a team lead. Your first team lead position was Electronic Arts?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 6:29

Great

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 6:30

Yeah. Yeah. So just 'cause I think there's a few things, as you go through your different career sort of stages, when I talk to the people that listen to here, listen to this, and we talk to candidates, and they talk about all of the different stages they go through, how, as an individual contributor, how did that sort of, how did you start moving into that team leading? 'Cause that's the first step into not maybe a management level, but that's the role that, the way that a lot of people tend to move, right?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 6:59

Yeah. I think it's a matter of just being good at coordinating things, working with your colleagues to make sure that at the end of the day you're, delivering on your objectives and your goals. So I knew that I, ultimately always wanted to go into leadership roles, and so that was one, where I had the first opportunity. Right after that, I ended up going to Beckman Coulter, and then that was as a manager. So that was the first time that I was a formal manager, and I had hire, fire, I owned the budget, and so forth. So that was the first time I was in a leg- let's say like a more legitimate leadership role.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 7:36

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 7:37

there, my next leadership job went to Beckman Coulter, and there I believe I started as a senior manager and then was promoted into what they called a national director. And so that was the first opportunity that I had to manage managers and manage different departmental functions. So up until that moment, I managed security teams, but they were security teams of, say, three to five people, so they were a little bit smaller organizations. But once I went to Beckman Coulter, we got into larger more complex s- security organizations. And as you become a director, the way that you manage managers is very different than the way that you manage senior leads or individual contributors. And that, I think, was the first time where I had my biggest lessons, my most painful lessons would've been there the first time I was promoted to a director

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 8:27

That's yeah, wow. That's a quite a, that's a reasonably linear progression when like at least when you describe it there. I'm wondering whether there, it wasn't as linear as it probably sounded. Is there, was there ups and downs? Was, how, what, what kind of happened during that period of time?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 8:43

So it was linear. It

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 8:44

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 8:45

I didn't start to see variation in my career path until after I left DirecTV. And that, that's a, and very important part of my career trajectory is that you can't really grow, if you're continuing your path linearly. The way that you have to grow is you have to jump off those tracks and try new things. I had a mentor who once told me that I needed to leave cybersecurity and she recommended I get into supply chain. And I looked at her and I said "Did I hurt you? Why would you say that," right? I realize how ignorant I was when I said that. But what she was saying was, and this was after a, a presentation I had to, first one, to a board of directors. I thought I had done this absolutely amazing job. I thought I was amazing at presenting to the board of directors, and they struggled to understand what I was saying. And it's we can all be speaking English, but we're not say, speaking the same English, and what it came to is that I had been so insular, so embedded in tech and cybersecurity that was my vocabulary. And the only way you can break out of that vocabulary is to get out and do different things and work with different groups and so forth. And yeah, that linear part of my career trajectory was good, but there came a point where it was a, it was not good for my career. And so that was one of the reasons why I left DirecTV was to take a break from tech, on a farm and build some robots and then from there pivot into being a CTO as well as a CISO

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 10:15

Yeah, I, it's, like it's an interesting, when I hear you talk about your path and making each step up, it sounds really simple as you t- as you talk about it there. But but I... First off, I know it isn't, right? I know there's more to that. But also I know, like from speaking to other people, like each one of those parts, as an individual contributor, trying to stand out to the rest of the team or compared to the rest of the team as the potential team lead, right? 'Cause, 'cause they're probably looking at everybody in the team to see who's gonna make that step. And then, like becoming a manager is tough. To do that internally, to apply for a job and be a team lead and manage to be taken on as a manager is another tough thing. So that takes a lot of sort of prep and a lot of skills. What did you do, first of all, do you think, when you look back, to stand out from all the other individual contributors that made them think of you as the obvious person to be the team lead?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 11:11

So I think some of it was luck, to be quite frank. Not everybody wants to manage, so if you're on a team where the, everybody is happy being an individual contributor and doesn't wanna deal with, the increased stress that comes with leading teams and so forth, it was a little bit easier for people who did want to move into management and so forth. So I think with the first position, it was a little bit more of that, where they were happy, the team members were happy being individual contributors, and I wanted to do that plus lead. In terms of the management position think that part of that was that we were so early in the industry that there weren't as many people who were trained. And for me, having been in that position, it was a little bit easier for me to get and obtain, a management position. And from there my first management position was this real opportunity to build, to, to build an actual cybersecurity program. And I would say that would be like my first big learning failure I would even say, is that when you start to lead a team, especially a security and GRC team, you cannot be insular. You can- you've got to network and work with other departments in order to ultimately be successful. You've got to understand their challenges. You have to understand the business. up until that moment, for me, security was binary, right? It was zeros and ones. It didn't matter. I can, apply security controls to whatever I need to. And that was the first time where I started to recognize, no you've got to really understand the business, and you have to understand their challenges because you cannot by edict lead. You have to lead collaboratively in, in the world of cybersecurity, once I had built, and made those mistakes and so forth, then moving into, say, for instance, a director position took a lot of work, in fact, it was harder, I think, for me to become a director than it was for me to become a manager or become a lead. And the reason is that you are managing budget. You are managing through through influence. You're not necessarily the person who's doing the hands-on work, and that was a challenge for me. I- in fact, I would say that was my first big career mistake, was that I didn't know how to delegate. Because for me I had this challenge where it was like you had to be technical, and so if I wasn't technical, I felt like I was not gonna be taken seriously.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 13:33

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 13:34

As I became a director, I still felt like I needed to do the work, and that's a detriment to the department. It's a de- detriment to you because if you're doing- doing the work and they're not doing their jobs, who's leading? Who's looking out and keeping the organization aligned? And that, that learning of how to manage managers and influence managers and so forth was was tough for me, and it took a couple of years for me to figure it out

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 14:00

You know what, when, as you say that, I try think about some of the other conversations I've had, and you're not the only person to talk about that. But I find, and I might be way out here, but I find that more sort of female leaders talk about that need to be seen as still technical. And I wonder whether there's, whether part of that is there's just so few female leaders out there as role models, and there's often an assumption that if you're female in a room full of, the typical makeup of the rooms in our industry and many other parts of the tech industry, their assumption is that the woman in the room isn't necessarily the technical person in the room. So I don't know whether did that influence part of that feeling at all?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 14:43

I'm sure. I do wanna be very clear that when I look at my career, almost every opportunity that I've had, almost every opportunity that I've had, has been because of a male. When I look at my key mentors, they've been male so I could never have gotten to where I am today had I not had a lot of male allies help uplift me through my tr- entire career. But, I think you would have the same problem if you were in sports and you were playing on a sports team and, it was majority male and then some female where at least at the very beginning you need to establish credibility

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 15:20

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 15:20

Make sure that people take you seriously. And yeah I'm sure that certainly played a part in it. I'm also competitive, so

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 15:27

I know also you're a tinkerer, so like I, I would imagine it's just hard for you to give up the technical side 'cause I know you're always tinkering with something, so

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 15:34

Oh it was. It was. It was and I got back to it, right? So I gave it up for just a hot second and so forth, but the second that I could, start working with like microcontrollers and, building out robotic systems, I jumped straight back into tech. But at the end of the day, you still have to be technical. But where your power really is understanding the business because you can't secure what you don't understand. You can't... There's so many different ways that you can approach implementation of security and controls that unless you understand the nature of the business how they make money, what their strategy ultimately looks like and so forth, then, what you're gonna recommend and what you're gonna build is gonna be problematic. But yeah. There was definitely this need to, prove yourself and, make sure that people take you seriously because security is about power as well. It is one of the few departments inside of a company that has the capability of saying no, and "no" is a very powerful word in corporations and with that kind of power people do need to take you seriously.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 16:41

Yeah.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 16:41

yeah.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 16:42

So with great power

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 16:42

The problem is that being technical doesn't have to equal competence. There's

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 16:46

Yes.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 16:47

more than just being technical

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 16:49

Abso-- me and you, as we've spoken multiple times about the attributes of being a CISO, so there's more, watch this space with that we could say, shouldn't we? No more than that. But yeah. But, and I think the business side always comes up. I always think that, I just did a, actually a little video which will probably be a few weeks, come out a few weeks before this, but for Tiro, just on the importance and one of the learns from all of the Root to CISOs was that I realized that the people whose careers have maybe been more linear and worked out a little bit more straightforward than others, have been the ones that have grabbed and understood where what they do sits within what the business does. And having that business knowledge is so important. So yeah, I think I appreciate you adding that 'cause I think that's a, that is a key point to it. Good. So you went through and then what's the bit... I can imagine, like all of a sudden you're managing as a director, right? You're directing managers, so you're leading people with a lot of experience, but also experience of being a manager and managing their own people. So what are the kind of headaches that kind of come with that? You said that was one of the biggest challenges for you.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 17:57

Oh yeah. First off, you've got to, you've gotta trust, so if you're somebody who's data-driven then oftentimes you need to d- I feel like you have this need where you need to drive into the data. And which is good, but it's also bad. You've you've gotta make sure that your managers know how to establish everything that they need in terms of managing and executing on the strategic plan that you've designed. I think if I started looking at the the challenges I initially had is that if they brought problems to me, I felt like I had to solve them. In fact, that's not the right way to do it. The right way to do it is work with them to come up with a solution, but you

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 18:36

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 18:37

You do that not letting people fail, somebody once told me that you're better off letting somebody fail 13 times and finally figure it out than to have them fail once and take it over. And that was a tough one for me, but it proved true because, you learn through failure.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 18:53

Yes

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 18:54

innovate without failing. And I failed, and people gave me the opportunity to learn past those failures, and so it was wrong of me to not let people get past those first and second failures. So I think not giving people enough space to innovate, to try things, to, fail on their own, I think that was one of the big mistakes that I also made at the very beginning of my management or my director level career.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 19:18

It's tough when you know or you're pretty sure you know the answers and you know what the problem is and you know that it could be fixed in a very short time, it's so hard to hold back and not, not do that. I've got-- I'm guilty of doing that at home, right? My wife is like I know what the problem is and my wife's complaining and I think I can fix this, I can fix this, and I just need to listen and then let her find out how to fix it. But I'm, married for many years now and still struggling with the same problem. And I think even that excitement to fix it and f- and almost be maybe a bit of a hero, right? I've got the answer, I'm gonna solve that for you

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 19:52

Sure. Yeah. There's it's it's being the hero, but it's also that, look, at the end of the day, you as the leader are, you get the accolades and you get the failures,

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 20:01

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 20:02

And so nobody likes those failures. And when you see something happening, there's the initial, of wanting to go in there and fix it for 'em. What you need to do is give people enough space so they fail. You don't want big black swan events to occur. But they, first and foremost, you may not have the right answer. You may have the common answer but the world is changing so fast. There's a lot of different... Things are multidimensional, so there's a lot of different ways to solve it, and through that person's failure, they may come up with, something even better,

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 20:32

yes

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 20:32

how to handle this. So there's that. But there's also, look, in order for you to be able to move up into security, you need to be able to have managed an operational capability. You need to understand how to manage budget, and those are things that you should also be pushing down to your leaders. Let them be able to manage a piece of the budget. Teach them how to build an, a, an operational capability. The things that they're gonna need so that they can move into your position, because ultimately what you should also be doing is training them to take over your job someday. Because let's just hope you win the lottery and you're able to move on.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 21:10

That, that's the mature leader's approach, right? I think, even me I look back at at me, like my move through in, in recruitment, but I moved through a similar process where I was a, an individual contributor, top biller, into a team leader, and then into a manager, and it was hard to give up the stuff that you were doing, like the hands-on stuff you were doing. It was hard to not solve the problems. And then, you realized as you got more mature that you had to build succession, right? For you to go anywhere, for people above you to look at you and say what are we gonna do?" "Janae's done an amazing job here, and she's built some great succession. Where is our-- Where are we creating the next opportunity for her?" So you do need-- The succession planning is so important, and you can't do it without giving up a bit of that control.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 21:59

Oh, you have to. You have to. You have to like almost take your job, reverse engineer it in terms of all of the skills that are necessary for you to be able to do your job, and then analyze your direct reports and do the gap assessment to see how far they are off of these different attributes to be able to take over that role. And then you gotta put the training program in place to be able to train them to take over that position. Because the more that they're able to do, the further out you can. A lot of the real fun work starts to get into the areas of things like strategy. If you can forecast out where the business is going, then that changes the nature of the architectures that you build. And if you're able to build systems and build, systems in terms of people, process, and technology that are adaptable and extensible enough to be able to meet where the company might decide to pivot and change, if you're working on that, then you've set up success for everybody else behind you. If you haven't done that, then you've built an enormous amount of technal- technical debt, and you've set up a company that wants to be able to pivot but can't necessarily pivot because you've been spending all of the time working on this for a strategy that the company is no longer adopting. You don't get a chance to work on strategy. You don't get the chance to work on innovation, so you have to allocate maybe 5 to 10% of your time towards things that are futuristic. We tend to think of those things as daydreaming. They're not. Star Trek is here.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 23:26

Yeah. And that's the... I love talking to you about this 'cause whenever we talk about the innovation stuff and the things that you're working on, the things you're doing, I'm always like, that seems so far in the future to me, but also realize that it's happening real quick, right? This stuff is coming. And actually, that probably brings us quite nicely onto onto Directv because you were head of security, in charge of the security, but also innovation as well over there, right?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 23:51

I did

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 23:52

do I remember rightly? I thought-

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 23:54

Yeah. That was... it was kinda towards the tail end of my time at DirecTV, and I was really fortunate to have had a leader who gave me the opportunity to lead both the function as well as the cybersecurity function, because I was at that crossroads in my career trying to figure out, look, at this point I'm in, for 15, years in cybersecurity, and I just, I wasn't sure if this was the path, and I just kept wanting to work on, whatever it is that my mind came up with. And so there is a process behind innovation. There's a structure behind innovation. And so because innovation reported into the same organization that handled enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and so forth I got to not only work on innovation, but, and this was really cool, make sure that cybersecurity and GRC was brought in at the innovation phase.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 24:52

Brilliant

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 24:53

So that was... That's rare. I s- think you see a little bit more today, but that was very rare. Security was always brought in on the back end, but by combining both of the groups, security was brought in at the front end of when we were coming up and ideating and coming up with great ideas to design the next X of the future. So yeah, that was a team of, I think, roughly 10 on that team. And that was a great honor to have led that team.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 25:19

Yeah, it's funny when it took me think about that and I talked to you about that, and then it was like a few years later everybody's talking about shifting left, right? And then you were already doing that

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 25:29

we were.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 25:29

right?

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 25:29

I wish I could take credit for that, but no. The senior vice president of strategy and innovation, this was his brainchild. And 'cause I I would think about that now, but back then it wouldn't have, it wouldn't have clicked with me. And so when he gave me the opportunity, it made sense at that point. But yeah, that was Frank Palisi, that was his idea

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 25:49

Nice. And then who were you reporting into at that point for the cybersec-

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 25:54

and

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 25:54

the head of strategy and inva- for cybersecurity as well? Or

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 25:57

yeah. I never... It was so funny because, like, when I was working there, it didn't make any sense to me. Because it's like 'cause you don't see that. You don't

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 26:05

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 26:06

function tying into strategy, innovation, architecture, and so forth. But these were my sister departments. And I... It wasn't until after I left DirecTV that I understood what the gift I was given by being in that function, because it meant that cybersecurity was with enterprise application, data, infrastructure, architecture, that we were with the middleware teams that we were alongside the data governance teams, that we were with the strategy and innovation teams. So while risk and audit and physical security, as an example, were certainly our... And fraud were our sister departments, my I guess we would call them a first team, the first team of which I was a part of were all people that were involved in the machine that made the enterprise IT department at DirecTV. And so it was a gift because once I then started transitioning into other companies I understood things in a way that I would say that a lot of people in cybersecurity and GRC people did not.

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 27:04

Yeah. Yeah, just having that broad view. And again, it's an attribute that comes up, right? The way security is very much horizontal through everything. You need to have a lot more of a wider view on this sort of stuff. Great. Let's talk about what you went and did after DirecTV.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 27:24

I took a career break, so I decided on my own that I needed some time to find myself and figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. Because like you had mentioned my career had been linear and it was... Believe it or not, I was in I was in San Francisco and I was chatting with a group of women. And one gal, she headed up an innovation team for one of the Fang organizations. And she had told me this story about how women don't take risks when it comes to- when they don't take risks the same way that men do. And I was like, "What are you talking about?" And I was like, "I do this, I do that," and I went through, like, all of the things that I do in terms of taking risks, and she said, "You're an adrenaline junkie. That's not about taking risk. A risk is what scares you." And she s- the story that she had essentially told was that women back in the day would have to stay within the village, whereas men would then have to leave the village and then establish a new family, a new clan and so forth. And men are, were more willing to take that risk and leave the career trajectory. And so when I looked at my career, and it was like you had described, I realized that I wasn't as brave as I had thought, and that caused this crisis within me, because I had always thought of myself as something different. And it, this of shook me to my core and I was like, "I need to stop and figure out who I am and, what I wanna do." And so I took nine months off to, I have a farm, still have a farm,

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 29:00

Yeah

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 29:01

we had just started it at that moment, and I took the time to help build out the infrastructure for the ranch and the farm and so forth. But I also... There were aspects of technology that I was really interested in, and that's where I s- first started working with robotics and microcontrollers and edge technologies just because for me, this was fun. And I've told this story before, but I had, i'll give you a great example. My husband has been collecting these tomato seeds for 20 years from all across the world. And so when he got his tractor, he's "I am man," and he was so proud of his freaking tractor. he goes and he plants all of these tomatoes in the field. And so we've got hundreds of tomatoes and they look beautiful and, just like a picture and stuff. And two weeks later two deer came in and ate every single plant. And he's in there, he's upset. Neighbors start bringing food to us because they think we're gonna starve because they thought that was what we used

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 30:00

That was your crop.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 30:01

Yeah, that's what I thought. So we have baskets of food coming. It was ridiculous, and I realized that how I've been in security my whole life, the first time I start building, a farm, I threw every single security lesson I had learned out the window. And my answer to it was robots, so

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 30:22

I, do you know what? I can't think of a better place to end part one of this conversation. We need to end it on the answer is robots If we, if there's not a whole bunch of people like begging for part two from this, I don't know what they're doing. I don't know what they're listening to. That's amazing. Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna end part one right there.

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 30:49

Yes

kris-rides_1_06-04-2026_144536 30:50

We'll stop here, and then we're gonna go off and record, carry on recording part two, but you are all gonna have to wait another week before you get to have part two. So watch this space. Thank you everybody for joining us. Me and Jenai will be back in a week's time

jenai-marinkovic--she-_2_06-04-2026_144535 31:07

Take care, everybody.

Speaker 31:10

Thank you for listening to the Root to CISO podcast. If there's something you really want me to ask on the next episode, or if you're a CISO who wants to inspire the next generation, please reach out. I'll leave a URL to my LinkedIn profile and make sure you connect and message me there. We're always looking for feedback, so please don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.