MSU Research Foundation Podcast

Inside BitLyft's Culture and Growth Story with Jason Miller

• MSU Research Foundation • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In this episode we talk with Jason Miller, founder and CEO of BitLyft, a cybersecurity company based in St. John’s, Michigan. Jason shares his entrepreneurial journey, from starting a company in Tampa, Florida, to returning to Michigan to build BitLyft, which specializes in cybersecurity solutions for mid-market organizations. They discuss BitLyft’s evolution from co-managed SIM services to its flagship TrueMDR platform, emphasizing the critical role of detection and automated incident response in today’s rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape. Jason also reflects on the challenges of building a sustainable business in rural Michigan while fostering a strong company culture across remote and local teams. This episode highlights Jason’s passion for innovation, customer-focused partnerships, and creating impact in his community.

Host: David Washburn
Guest: Jason Miller, Founder and CEO of BitLyft
Producers: Jenna McNamara and Doug Snitgen
Music: "Devil on Your Shoulder" by Will Harrison, licensed via Epidemic Sound

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David Washburn:

This was a fun conversation with Jason Miller, who is the founder and CEO of Bityft. He's one of the very early entrepreneurs that we worked with as we began to roll out our system of resources, and Jason's built a software security company and is based in St John's. I just think he's a real solid business builder focused on creating a sustainable business in his hometown. So I hope you enjoy this. Hey, Jason. Thanks for being here.

Jason Miller:

It's always a pleasure to be here in East Lansing and sitting down and chit-chatting with you and the rest of the team at [the MSU Research Foundation] Red Cedar Ventures and Spartan Innovations.

David Washburn:

BitLyft is one of our very early investments as part of our venture platform, and, I'm trying to think, we go back probably at least eight or nine years, when you were just starting your company, and I was curious if you would start by telling us about what your life was like before you started a company. What was your career, and what led you to wake up one day and say, golly, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur.

Jason Miller:

Yeah, so it goes back a little bit.

Jason Miller:

I did another startup in in Tampa Florida for a number of years.

Jason Miller:

We ran that for about five, five and a half years, and then we sold it to another company called Concerto Cloud and through that I decided to move back from Tampa to Michigan and I did some independent consulting for a couple of organizations and through that I realized I wanted to start another company and realizing that consulting has got its ups and downs.

Jason Miller:

But what was really rewarding for me was to actually make a change and an impact inside of the marketplace and other people's lives, and through consulting, I just didn't find it that that was going to happen. So I also was having some great opportunities to see what was going on inside of cybersecurity in the mid-market and through that, noticed that cybersecurity wasn't really getting done great at all in the mid-market. In actuality, a lot of consulting companies were just coming in and coming out of organizations and leaving organizations very vulnerable and coming out of organizations and leaving organizations very vulnerable. So I wanted to offer up something that was, you know, not a SaaS service before and turn it into a SaaS, and so that's how BitLyft was birthed.

David Washburn:

Were you in the security space in Tampa.

Jason Miller:

We were in the cloud ERP space. So we were embracing cloud, we were bracing data centers and and very integrated organizations and delivering software remotely. So security was built in. That's one of the things that I say you know to everybody today is is you can't do it without security. So for the most part I was doing security, but not as a full-time dedicated role.

David Washburn:

Okay, so we get to the BitLyft point and you have an idea, a vision, and recognize opportunities here. So you'd launch BitLyft what year?

Jason Miller:

So we launched in late 2016. Had lots of conversations in 2016 about what we wanted to do and and how to come about that. And, uh, the software that we've seen in the space and the services that were on the space and and it was just really lackluster. You know, there was, there was a lot of software getting deployed at the time with professional blocks of hours, and then when the professional block of hours is done, you know the organization is really left to just try and manage it to their best abilities. And you're talking about cybersecurity. You know, if the door on the front door wasn't working, I think that organizations wouldn't necessarily go home until the front door was working again, properly locked closed and and keeping the organization safe. We're okay with that in a physical realm, but, but in a digital realm, we often sort of say, well, how much risk does this expose us to? And so forth. So we just seen that early on and decided to go after it.

David Washburn:

And and tell me about the uh, the, the product or service that you envisioned and then eventually built. Give me the pitch on the product.

Jason Miller:

Yeah, so it's definitely changed a little bit since, since starting 2016, early 2017. In the beginning we started out with what we called co-managed SIM, and SIM stands for security information event management. So you're doing log collection from literally everything inside of IT and you're doing real time analysis, correlation, creating events and alerts out out of those, and then you need to go do something with that information, particularly incident response. And so, um, you know, quickly, within the first couple of years, the first 12, 24 months, we realized like it's no longer good enough to just send an alarm or alert or notification to a customer or to another person you know that we're protecting and let them know hey, you've got a problem over there. They would come back to us and say I need help with that problem because I don't completely understand it, I'm missing context. How does that problem affect my business and my organization? And so we quickly evolved and realized like we need to start doing incident response immediately after alerts are going off, with the customer involved, because, you know, those folks are typically IT folks. There are some security folks, but most of them are IT folks and they need help and assistance. To go on beyond the alert, where is this problem actually affecting my organization, right that type of thing.

Jason Miller:

So we continuously improved the product and service, you know, over time and it's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about it is because it just continuously improves. You know, every day, every week, there's always new adjustments and new things made to it. So, you know, today we're sitting at a product that we call TrueMDR, and it is because we leave no rock unturned. We're looking at logs from. You know, everything inside of the IT and the organization and the software, whether it's cloud or on-prem or a SAS application. It's so important that you know we cover um, the, the ability to monitor and detect across everything that an organization is using. So, yeah, that's that's how we got started and that's a little bit about where we're at today.

David Washburn:

And to your point, the R of MDR is the response piece which is kind of what has evolved and what I think everyone knows is the number and sophistication of security attacks changes practically daily.

Jason Miller:

Daily and so having that ability to move beyond just monitoring and detecting but actually doing something about it is sort of the big sort of shift. Is what I'm hearing you say yeah, and even you know the marketplace today is. We trademarked Bitlyft Air years ago and because we seen the writing on the wall that we needed to have automated incident response and so we called it air right and that whole thing it's. It's no longer good enough to just have people as part of your response. You need to have policy, you need to have other things, but most the time any c-suite orsuite or person at the organization wants response quickly. You know, either in minutes or seconds.

Jason Miller:

You know it's no longer good enough like, okay, well, we clean this up in a couple of days or a week and the problem's over with no, because, like a couple of days or a week could have massive impacts on the organization. You know it depends on what size they are, what type of data was taken from the organization and so forth. So I mean response is is so important today and that's probably the biggest piece that has evolved. Detection we have done very well. We have come a long way in the detection methodologies, but if you can't detect something today that's kind of like your core right, you might as well hang up your hat, but the biggest thing that we're evolving and innovating on is that response piece in the remediation portion.

David Washburn:

Tell us about your profile of your customers. What types of organizations are hiring your firm to do the monitoring and detection and response?

Jason Miller:

Yeah, so typically it's a mid-market type of company. They could have anywhere between, say, you know, a hundred users to several thousands of users, employees in the organization, and you know they have SaaS applications. They're taking part in Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services and Azure and things like that. But they are also, you know, when you look at the verticals they're in. They're water companies that maybe have, you know, 80 people're producing electricity for a small municipal or a midsize municipal. They're a CMMC DOD manufacturer.

Jason Miller:

We have several of those because Bitlyft aligns really well to the CMMC NIST 800-171 controls and the CIS benchmark and controls. All of our employees are United States based and so all of our infrastructure, our software, is based here in the US and so all of the things that are necessary for some of these very important verticals where they're just outside of what's called critical infrastructure, but they still have audits, they still have to maintain regulatory compliance and they need to meet certain standards. That is our perfect sort of customer base today and we serve them really well and they serve us really well. So it's a good thing for both of us.

David Washburn:

That's great. Tell me about your company. We were an early investor and I knew you're based in St John's and I want to talk about that in a minute. But give me size and scope and reach of folks people that are on staff.

Jason Miller:

We're actually pretty optimized and efficient. When I tell that to most people their eyes get really big, but it's like we'd lead with software and automation first mindset. And so you know, I see our organization probably growing to about maybe 50, 60, 70, you know, maybe 80 people at some point, um, but still being extremely efficient for for what we're doing. Um, our software is great and it allows us to scale people very well, um, and then you know, from St John's, I mean we're just North of Lansing, like 20 minutes, and and so we can get to all of the big stuff that we we want to.

Jason Miller:

But for the most part we love living and doing work in rural Michigan, but we do have employees. Actually, probably about half of our staff is outside Michigan, Oklahoma and Illinois and North Carolina and Texas, and so it's given us this capability. We had to grow in a couple of areas remote work how do you, you know, build culture with employees that are not coming into the office every day and how do they feel part of the organization and things like that? And then how do they carry the mission and the vision and the values of the company Again when they're maybe literally walking out of the bedroom and going into the room next door, which is their office.

Jason Miller:

And you know, you see them from, you know the shoulders up Right, and so you know you want to make sure that you're building a company that has good culture and that understands those things and that you're you're being appreciative of the employee that has joined the team and wants to carry the torch and, at the same time, they are helping, you know, defend our customers from these cyber attacks, and so you have to build a close-knit relationship with these folks. These folks have chosen to do life with you, you know at work, and they've also chosen to latch on to. You know my vision and mission for the company.

David Washburn:

So, and you have a cool place.

Jason Miller:

We've got a great place. You're in downtown St John's. Downtown St John's we had the opportunity to remodel a second story of a building that hadn't been touched in since, like the 50s or 60s, I was told from people that have been there forever. It was an old jewelry store on the first floor and the second floor was nothing but storage. If I give you an idea, there was no insulation, no electrical, no heating, cooling or anything on the second floor and there was an old gas lamp gas light in the ceiling, which we obviously took out. But now the space is beautiful and everybody really loves coming into the office and it's a. It's a. It's a beautiful open concept space. That's great.

David Washburn:

That's awesome. Well, congratulations to you on the business you've built, uh and um and and your location. I'm curious. You know, in terms of Bitlyft you've got a group now and there's sounds like steady growth ahead. What are the biggest sort of challenges to your organization as you anticipate that?

Jason Miller:

growth. I think the biggest thing for us that we talk about a lot internally is is always making sure that we're communicating the value to our customers Um, whether that's verbal communication, written communication, and making sure that they understand the value, because most organizations I'll say this, like out of our customer base, you know it, it is not all of them are going to experience a successful cyber attack every day. But there is the law of averages where eventually you know that criminal is going to find his or her way into the organization and be successful, and so you have to just plan for that. So our thing is you know, no customer really calls us to just sort of shoot the breeze, if you will, or, you know, share happy moments. Typically, when customers call us, they're sort of unhappy. They're dealing with a situation they don't want to be dealing with that day. They had other plans, that type of thing, with threat detection methodologies as also building automated incident response modules in response to situations where they're potentially unforeseen.

Jason Miller:

You know we all sort of get locked in on how we see a cyber attack that's going to happen because we've read about it or we've seen historical ones before. But the reality is, is that the future cyber attacks that are going to be successful are probably going to look different, they're going to act different, they're going to get in through different methodologies, and so it's. It's always building the detection methodologies that will help us keep, you know, on that forefront and as well as making sure that our customers know that we've got their, their, their best interest you know, at mind all the time, not just when they pay us, but you know, when they're having a bad day and a bad moment, that they know that Bitlyft is there to protect them through and through and you know they have a true partnership. That's one of the things is we actually don't use the word customer a whole lot, if any.

Jason Miller:

Inside of Bitlyft as a customer means you. Any inside of Bitlyft as a customer means, you know, transactional relationship. It really focuses on the money side of things, whereas as we think about partnership, you know, like how can we make sure that you're more secure today and tomorrow than you were yesterday? And giving you recommendations to make sure that you're always going to be more secure. So it's just things like that that we think about inside, and that's probably one of the areas that keeps me up at night, you know, is just making sure. Like you know, I talked with my wife and I'm always talking about bit lift and I'm always thinking about how to, how do we get to the next level and what is the next level? And making sure that the customer knows that we're seeking the next level for them, right, and you know just extreme passion for this, the space, you know this is Jason Miller.

David Washburn:

He is the founder and the CEO of BitLyft, which he started in 2016. Congratulations on your success. Continued best wishes to you and your team.

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