Founder Feature: Maggie Louie, CEO of DEVCON
Maggie Louie is an actual rock star CEO. Prior to starting DEVCON, a Memphis- and Atlanta-based cybersecurity company, she toured for many years as a singer-songwriter and band frontwoman. After a successful career in the music industry, Louie created digital products for more than a decade for companies like the Los Angeles Times and E.W. Scripps. During that time, she assisted law enforcement in a case, which led to the first ever conviction for online ad theft and money laundering.
DEVCON was founded in 2017, born out of Louie’s commitment to preserve independent reporting by protecting journalists and news outlets from hackers. Louie was invited to go through a Start Co. startup accelerator later that year, during which she met DEVCON co-founder Josh Summitt. Since that time, DEVCON has pivoted to focus on JavaScript security breaches and attacks. “Websites now are very complex. They enable all sorts of web applications through third-party code, code you don’t own. It’s like many pneumatic tubes sitting on your website being filled every few seconds without being checked to see if they’re secure,” Louie said. “We sit in the browser, and when a user comes onto the site [through the tubes], we look at the information and check it. We’re continuously monitoring what’s happening in the browser.”
Louie and the team at DEVCON are committed to democratizing cybersecurity, making it accessible, user-friendly and free. In light of the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic, DEVCON created a five-minute installation of the enterprise version of their software, a process which for other cybersecurity interventions might take weeks or months. Additionally, they’ve released a community version of their product that is free for anyone to download and meant to protect businesses just starting out or folks side-hustling their products through online stores like Etsy or Shopify. “Security should be beautiful. It shouldn’t be this ugly, clunky thing,” Louie said. “It should have a nice customer experience and be fast, agile and flexible.”
Louie brings an ethos of doing business differently to the fore in many aspects of DEVCON’s culture. “We have a very focused mission to be a human-first company, and I don’t mean like free lunches and IPAs,” Louie said. “[With potential hires] we look for what we have that might lead to a purposeful life that would bring meaning to them. When [toxic corporate culture] eliminates joy from someone’s life, you’ve eliminated any inspiration they could bring to the job. You’ve limited the scope of their world in a way that’s going to limit what they can bring to the company. It’s important to move away from a rigid corporate model, it won’t work in the future.”
Most recently, DEVCON was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Each year, the Forum selects a limited number of companies ‘poised to have a significant impact on business and society’ to involve in their programs and initiatives. DEVCON will work closely with the World Economic Forum over the next two years to create research, intelligence, conversation, and solutions around data security. “We’ve become conditioned to click ‘accept.’ We naively stumble into many scenarios where an apparent lack of options will cause us to click ‘accept’ when we should not,” Louie said. “Consumers don’t understand what’s at stake here -- we’re able to enable the kind of rights you expect in your real life in terms of privacy, security, and safety. We want to be an enablement of your rights and security.”
DEVCON is already a global leader in JavaScript security, and will work alongside major companies and the World Economic Forum to solve international issues of cybersecurity. At the same time, DEVCON is committed to supporting Memphis and its residents. “Memphis is growing leaps and bounds in its tech culture and community here. When you think about how you can affect the life of someone living in poverty, we can be giving folks jobs in their community so they don’t have to leave,” Louie said. “We want to bring visibility to women in cyber and IT, and bring visibility to the City of Memphis and what’s happening here.”