In your words, what is your role at Trava.
My job is, I would say twofold right now. One half of my job currently, and has been, is to help with building out security features for our platform, research, and introduce new scanner that would make a platform better at uncovering vulnerability and identifying risk for a customer and even scoring and ranking those risks and present them in a way that makes sense and make it easy for a customer to work on them. The other half,, making sure everybody’s working securely, making sure our data access environment is well protected. That would be my job.
Describe Trava in 3 words.
I’ll say challenging is one, fulfilling is another one. It feels like whatever I’m working on here is just what I want to work on and feels like I’m accomplishing something much bigger than just finishing my job. Supportive, feels very supported by anybody around me. Rob and Jim, and pretty much everybody.
Where is your happy place?
I would say probably my childhood home in Vietnam. Spending most of my life there and that’s something I look forward to every time I come back. It’s really not to travel anywhere, I just want to be there and that’s where I feel most relaxed and really have all my stress taken away.
If you could give your 13 year old self advice, what would it be?
Probably learning to speak another language. Yeah, especially English and it would be nice if I had picked up something else earlier too, just because it’s easier to learn new languages when you are younger and the older you are, the harder it is. That would have helped me so much with at least the first four years of my life in the US.
What is your favorite motivational quote?
Yeah. There’s one that’s stuck with me throughout the year and it’s by Ray Lewis. He was a NFL head coach. I don’t remember the team, but the quote goes,
“If tomorrow wasn’t promised, what would you give for today?”
Maybe different people have different interpretations of that. But to me that is basically saying, give everything you have to give for every given day, live one day at a time and just do everything you can on that day and don’t leave it for tomorrow. That stuck with me throughout the years. That’s one that I always remember and always answer when somebody asks.
What has been your favorite project at Trava?
It has to be the risk assessment. I’m working on it right now and it’s still ongoing. But I think it is very challenging, it’s going to change a lot about the way our product works and the way the information that we collect, to present it back to our customer. I think it’s going to help them tremendously in terms of understanding the risk facing the environment and how to mitigate them. I think it’s going to make Trava a “I have to have this” solution for anybody out there.
Cats or dogs?
I would have to say dogs without hesitation up until probably eight months ago when I found a stray cat and then ever since then I have slightly developed affection for cats. Dogs, 70%, cats, 30%.
What is your definition of success?
I think I know when I’ve succeeded at a task when I accomplished the objective that I set out for that task and if there’s no other better way to do that task, I guess. It’s sort of twofold.