CZ and Friends
CZ & Friends is a podcast about what it takes to lead and evolve legal in an era of exponential change. Hosted by Cecilia Ziniti, former General Counsel turned founder and CEO of GC AI, each episode features candid conversations with legal and business leaders who are building for scale, taking bold bets on technology, and leading with humanity. Whether you're a GC, operator, or in-house counsel, this podcast is your front-row seat to the future of legal.
CZ and Friends
From Engineer to CAO: Diane Honda on AI, Trust, and Leading Change
What does going from writing code to leading legal, compliance, HR, and security at a high-growth tech company look like?
In this episode, Diane Honda shares her journey from Carnegie Mellon software engineer to GC who took Barracuda Networks public, to her current role as Chief Administrative Officer at Redis. Along the way, she’s shaped how companies adopt AI, built legal teams into growth engines, and developed a leadership philosophy rooted in trust, adaptability, and action.
Follow Diane:
@Diane Honda on LinkedIn
Books Mentioned:
– Burn the Boats by Matt Higgins
– The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn
Show Notes:
– Diane’s path from software engineer to GC to CAO
– Why Redis leans into AI adoption across every function
– How AI is redefining the associate role at law firms
– Trust, risk, and liability when AI generates work product
– Leading through cybersecurity crises and high-stakes board roles
– Developing multi-hat leadership across legal, HR, compliance, and security
– Career decisions that shaped her trajectory from HP to Redis
– Lessons from taking Barracuda public and leading transformative deals
Follow us on all social platforms to get each new episode when it drops.
@Cecilia Ziniti on LinkedIn
@CeciliaZin on Twitter/X
@GC AI on LinkedIn
gc.ai website
You land on the shore, you burn the boats, you're going forward, there's no way back. That's just a a great way to think about when you lean into something, you really have to fully commit. Is this going to be your end game here? Because if it's not, and you've already started to think about your next plan, the likelihood of success on what's in front of you right now is far less than it would otherwise be.
Cecilia Ziniti:Welcome back to CZ and Friends, where we talk with legal leaders, technologists, and operators driving innovation and excellence in their companies and beyond. I'm your host, Cecilia Ziniti. Today's guest is Diane Honda, a deeply respected tech executive and board member whose career journey began in engineering, went through to legal leadership, and now she's in high-stakes operational roles. Diane started out as a software engineer and built her legal leadership career at companies like Barracuda Networks, where she took the company public and led through MA and private equity transactions. Today, Diane is the chief administrative officer at Redis, in-memory database company, and sits on several boards focused on cybersecurity and tech equity. In this episode, we'll talk about the evolution of the in-house legal role, how AI is reshaping the law firm model, and why trust and leadership are the net's big frontiers. Let's dive in. Diane, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Acheya. How are you today? I'm doing great. So excited to speak with you. So you began your career as a software engineer and later transitioned into legal and then eventually operations. That's not that cum of a path. How did your technical background shape the way you eventually became a GC and now CAO?
Diane Honda:Yeah, you're right. It's not the typical path that people take. And, you know, I actually am very grateful for the path that I took. Encouraged, actually, when I was young, I really liked software engineering. And so I really decided at that point in time that I wanted to get a technical education. So I went to Carnegie Mellon University. And even at that time, I knew that I would probably stay in a business trajectory more than a pure technical trajectory. So I double-majored in industrial management right then. And the day that I finished my undergrad, I applied to take the LSAT because I also knew I would go on to law school at some point in the future. You know, when I was at CMU, I was in a software engineering program. And even then, if you think about it, AI didn't start with Gen AI, right? It started many, many years ago with robotics and AI and machine learning. And Carnegie Mellon was at the forefront of that. So, you know, it was really nice to start my tech career in a in a university that was very forward-looking at that time. And so I just kind of continued with that as I went through my business and uh legal journey. And so right now, as you said, I work at Redis and I am the chief administrative officer. So I manage our legal compliance, information security, IT, and HR organizations. And as you said, I also sit on a couple of boards, and they're all very different, and yet AI is permeating and technology is impacting each one of them. One of the boards I'm on, the Hillman Group, makes basically building and construction hardware, yet they are very progressive in how they're thinking about their use of AI. And then other company that I'm on, the LucidWorks, is an AI-based search company, and again, you know, has moved quickly into the generative AI space, it's in its business as well. And so, you know, I think about from the board work to my operational role, how AI is just fundamentally changing business processes. And, you know, the reason that, you know, you and I connected with GC AI is because I believe that AI fundamentally changes the legal landscape and the legal function more quickly than other areas. And so it is just a great place for companies to dive in. We've done it and I've seen it in so many other companies.
Cecilia Ziniti:Love to hear that. So how is AI, you know, let's get a little bit more breast tax. Like, how is AI actually affecting either your day-to-day work or you inevitably, I'm sure, manage across your different functions? Um, you know, lots of outside vendors, outside counsel, obviously your team. Paint a picture for us.
Diane Honda:Yeah. So, you know, at Redis, we've chosen to basically be a lean-in company to AI. We haven't waited till we found that one perfect AI tool to let anybody try anything. We've actually taken the opposite approach. We've let each business function lean in, look for the tools that can optimize them. And then we have a quick review process just to make sure from a legal compliance perspective that we're complying with data privacy, confidentiality, and so forth. But it's almost like if we can't find a reason not to let them try it, then we're gonna let them try it, right? It's it's sort of, you know, just a pretty much approved by default velocity philosophy. And so what it's done is increase the velocity at which we've been able to adapt it. So we've adapted it across, you know, almost every function now. You know, we've got a couple of different AI code generating tools that our engineering team is leveraging heavily, right? We've got AI note takers, project managers. We use, you know, several AI-based legal tools, right? Our marketing function is leaning in, our sales function. So, you know, I I can't think of a function that isn't already, you know, using at least one, maybe more, AI-based tools, you know, with a heavy emphasis now on generative AI and trying to really get some productivity around that. So, you know, I think it's just everywhere. It came on is what is the fastest technology ever adopted, right? If you think about it. And it's moving at a velocity where I think if you don't take a lean in velocity of philosophy, you're not going to be able to take advantage and you're gonna get left behind.
Cecilia Ziniti:How uh so you've been in-house uh most of your career. You started HP and actually evolved from sounds like engineering to legal while you were there. How does that do you think that was an ingredient in getting you to be then CAO of a company leaning in on tech? Like, I mean, I I want to home in for listeners just how remarkable this is that this is, you know, a pretty big mature public company that Diana's leader of. And she basically just said, you know, pick your AI tool, it's default approved. Obviously, we're gonna check it out. But in general, we're saying yes. That's pretty rare. So I guess my my question is does your experience having come up in-house at these innovative companies, is that is that what got you there and how?
Diane Honda:Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. First of all, I think you're right. I don't fear technology like some lawyers that don't have a technical background and aren't grounded in the tools. I think we have a very progressive CEO who is highly technical and believes in the future of AI and what it's going to do from a corporate perspective. Our product leverages AI, right? So, you know, when we're building, when we are helping developers with an AI-based data platform, you know, we are putting out a product that really is driving, similar to what we did in the past, driving sort of web applications with caching and speeding them up. We're now driving sort of the AI, you know, the agentic AI layer that really gives you sort of that short-term memory, and Redis is perfect for that. So when you think about it, we are an AI-focused company helping comp helping other companies generate their AI applications. And then you have a technology-based CEO as well as myself who comes from a technical background and just leans in in general to technology. So I think it's a combination of reasons why we've taken that philosophy. And we've also seen that, you know, ultimately if you put some guardrails around how you tell people to use it, you put some information out there, you have a very quick response to what they want to do. It encourages them to kind of surface tools. And in some cases, you know, AI note-taking classic example, right? There's many, many out there. You know, we have one that people have been using pretty heavily. Someone brings in another one. We can quickly just say, hey, this one's already in use, deployed, go ahead and try it. So it's created this fast approval review process that has allowed us to leverage the tools more broadly, more quickly. So I think it's a it's been really impactful thus far. And I expect that as we go further down this journey, it will continue to help us in our business.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. So with A AI handling, so let's assume that you know, like so you're you're you're ahead, you're giving us a window. Most legal teams, I think, for context. Diane and her team adopted legal AI almost a year ago. So pretty, pretty cutting edge in terms of that. Uh where where is this going? So if with AI handling more of kind of let's say the the entry level type analysis, or you know, we had a I heard a report of somebody making basically a, you know, used to be at the law firm, you'd make a chart benchmarking terms of use or something, and that would take an associate a few days. Now AI can do that effectively instantly. Um, how do you see the role of associates at law firms evolving? How do you, you're obviously really big on mentoring and bringing up your team. What happens with AI?
Diane Honda:Yeah, it's it's a really good question. And I think first of all, I should say I never went out to a law firm. I did, as you said, I started out in a technology role, did a law degree in the evenings when I was working for Healup Hackard, and I moved into a legal role at HP. And it was funny, when I wanted to leave HP, the first role that I applied for, the, you know, I went through the entire interview process, the red team was ready to make an offer to me. And the general counsel at that time said, wait a minute, she didn't work in a law firm. I don't want to hire her. So it was at that point in time, you know, that was like back then, it just shows you kind of where the world was. If you didn't have this, you know, law firm experience, I wasn't really even hirable. And it was a large company, it was a Fortune 100 company at the time, just was not interested. And so, you know, you think that forward, it's been a little bit of progress in that regard that more lawyers come in, especially as firms didn't hire as many associates in the past. They went straight in-house. But it was a bit of a lift for an in-house company to, you know, group to turn to train an associate because law school thinks it teaches you what to think or how to think a little bit, but it doesn't teach you how to do your job. You know, other degrees teach you how to do your job. You go come out with a software engineering degree, you are soon to be able to write software, write code, right? You don't have that same, you know, level of, I think, you know, law school training that gets you in that practical deep level. So, you know, how do I think this looks in the future, right? I think a couple of things change, right? Law firms are a service business, they're gonna want to use AI themselves. Likewise, the in-house council is starting to use it, and there's really no barrier of entry from the law firm or the in-house council from using the same AI tools. So it now puts at the in-house council's fingertips what, to your point, really, associates and other, you know, paralegals and law firms had better access to legal research tools, to maybe other charts that were created in the past from other lawyers. Right now, all of that is almost done instantaneously with AI tools, right? So I do think there's gonna need to be a different way that law firms think about the associates, especially when you think about high cost how how high the cost of an associate and a partner billing rate is. It's just gonna gravitate more of that entry-level work to in-house counsel with AI tools, and you're really only gonna wanna pay for the deep sort of partner level expertise of a lawyer in an outside firm, right? So it it will change it, and I think it's a great shift because I think companies should be more self-sufficient, honestly. There's really no need when the tools are out there to not lean into them and do the work that you can do at that, you know, sort of paralegal and and associate level. And the other thing that, you know, I think is gonna happen that's gonna drive it even further is if you think about like a simple form, like a trademark filing, right? But there's gonna be ways very quickly, right, where you can get the information, the form can populate with an agent, and it can basically go out and start that filing process for you. So think about a lot of the things that you know took expertise just based on the repetitive nature of it or the specific nature of it, that the in-house council didn't really bother to learn all those specific processes. AI is gonna do all that for us, and we're not gonna need the outside council, the paralegers, the associates to do that work for us. And I think that's actually an incredibly, you know, exciting vision for the future. It'll make the work that we do and the our ability to do it in-house so much better.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. So you mentioned something about you know, you'll you'll still go to outside council for that deep expertise. Do you see AI creating kind of this bifurcated legal experience? Or like where you know you've got the the in-house folks kind of like directly advising the business, and then you've got these very specialized, you know, high-level partners or like give us one more prediction. So you so you do a bunch of predictions, but what what what do you think of the sort of tiering of legal? Some people have talked about it that way.
Diane Honda:I do, and I do think there's going to be a tiering, right? The tricky thing is you want to go out and you want to buy that expertise. The question is, how do they get that expertise, right? Because as there's less of this sort of training model within the law firm, how are they going to get that expertise when more of it's being done by in-house lawyers? And we're at a point now where we've had enough lawyers come through the legal system and the and the law firm kind of associate model that there is the baseline level of knowledge out there and which we're building on that expertise. If you think about AI taking that lower level and sort of helping, you know, an a newer lawyer or an in-house lawyer with far less years of experience than in the past do a lot of that work, I think we are going to only go out. And in fact, you know, to be fully transparent, that's kind of the model that we're taking right now. We do, we use several AI tools to help us. And then we only really go out for the deeper expertise and we don't use outside law firms to nearly to the degree that we used to, right?
Cecilia Ziniti:So it's amazing. All right, so let's talk about risk. So I'm so excited with the lean-in philosophy. We're all leaned in, you know, in the Cheryl Sandberg sense and the AI sense, all that. So if an AI system generates a document or a video, or in Redis' case, code, or, you know, in the case of your your other um that can be on the board of, you know, the student making physical products, like, you know, how do you think about liability and responsibility in in the AI with AI in the loop?
Diane Honda:Yeah, and I guess you kind of think about that in two different ways, right? There's a lot of what AI is going to produce, you know, a red-lined document. Um uh uh maybe if we're using it for code debugging, for example, it's going to find something, it's going to suggest a fix, right? So that's still all human-assisted, right? We haven't pulled the human out of the AI experience yet. And so you still have that human controlling, if you will, the risk and managing that, right? When you get to that level where I think we're not that far away, you know, as more and more agents get created, right? You're gonna pull the human out of it. And then I think it's it's like any progressive change where we trusted software, right, to do things that we used to do ourselves, right? We trusted calculators to add things that we used to feel like we had to double check. I think as the technology gets more, you know, ubiquitous and pervasive out there, what you're gonna find is that you're gonna be able to trust the output of the agent just as much as you trusted the output of the human, right? And so we're in that transition right now. And, you know, the human-assisted AI, I think, is relatively low risk. And that's why we've leaned in so heavily with a lot of these tools that basically just allow us to be more efficient and do things faster. And then as we get to the full-on, you know, this is a fully automated start to finish process. It's like anything. We'll test it, we'll QA it, we'll make sure we're comfortable with the output. And once we are, then we'll test it less frequently and just let it roll, right? I think that's just a progression that it will happen. It'll happen quickly.
Cecilia Ziniti:Yeah, fun funny you use the terminology, let it roll. So I um spent a year as um an AGC at Cruise for autonomous vehicles. And it turns out now, you know, here we are in 25, and the Waymo's in San Francisco have a much uh better track record in terms of collisions, in terms of mutations, all of it than the human drivers. And it's it's been just fascinating to see because it was exactly as you said, where it was human-assisted and there were the kind of like safety drivers there to step in. But we've gotten to that point. And I I think it'll be interesting to see the law uh you know adjust there. Slowly, Amazon had this um drone initiative. And, you know, thinking about drone delivery, Bezos told the team, and I think he said this in public things, you know, the real challenge here is gonna be the public policy. It's not technical. We're gonna figure out how to drop a package on your doorstep, you know, before we figure out how to make that legal in in 50 states. So fascinating. So maybe I guess, you know, knowing that that's where this is going, you know, what do you do internally in terms of policies as a company, knowing that that's the world that we're going to? So how do you position yourself to be, you know, Waymo in this example?
Diane Honda:Yeah, it's uh it's a really good question. And I I agree with you in the fact that, you know, over time, you know, this technology becomes more reliable. It's the law that does know how to deal with it, right? If you think about a document that's produced purely by AI right now, right? And you want to get that into court. You know, you used to need, or you probably still need, actually, the person who wrote the document, the creator of that document to lay a foundation to get it admitted, to talk to the veracity of it and the background and and all the other history around that document. Well, you don't really have that if the document is really AI generated. You have some of it, but now you need your lawyers and your judges to understand like what was the technology that created it and why they can feel comfortable relying on it as actual and legitimate, right? And it would be great if there was a time if there was an actual little document marker that was in everything that AI created that said this is for real and you can trust it, but we've already gone too far for that to happen. And if it happens, there's already millions of documents created without that. So the technology didn't, you know, didn't provide the answer on a forward-looking basis for that. So now it's gonna have to be the law and it's gonna have to be educating people about the technology, thinking differently about how we view evidence and other things that the law that we need for the legal system to work well, right? And then I think it's gotta be a balance like every other sort of transformative change, right? The law's gonna catch up. We're always gonna have these cases of first impression. We're gonna have to rely on good lawyers who understand the technology to help educate good judges to help create good decisions, right? And I'm not sure we'll always get that outcome, but I do think it's gonna be that path. There will be legislative, there it already is, right? There's stuff out there, and we, like all companies, have policies around how you can use it, can't use it. You know, if you are gonna use it this way, come to legal, let us put these guardrails around it. So I think, you know, we in in-house are gonna have to make the rules that doesn't exist on the outside yet to feel comfortable about using it and leaning in. But I I think we can. And I think that's that's kind of the role that of how the in-house council is evolving in this new AI tech world. And I I think it's a great opportunity for us to lead and not wait.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. So on that opportunity to lead as from the GC seat, you know, I'm gonna go a little off script here and say, you know, of everything you've achieved as a GC or a or now a CAO, what are you most proud of?
Diane Honda:Uh that's a good question. You know, there are a lot of things that I think, you know, I I look and I think about. I'm really, really proud that I was able to do certain things. I think part of it, what I would say is really building a framework that allows people in my organizations to grow and develop and support the business, you know, grow and be agile through these changing shifts, right? Like you want to be in any role, whether it's a business role, a legal role, HR, you want to be a facilitator of change. And I feel like I've done a lot of transformative change. I've taken companies public, I've taken them private, we've leaned into technology, we've had to, um, you know, we I was working for a security company on the cutting edge of a lot of the, you know, cybercrime and so forth. And so I think it's really the fact that I am willing to lean in and make a decision and I instill that in my team that it's really important that we be sort of change agents and not change blockers. And I I think you can look at every area that I've led and every company that I've been in, and I try to bring that philosophy to the team because I think that's that's how businesses and that's how people, right? And businesses are made of people, that's how we succeed.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. So imputing that probably your advice for GCs is would be what? Like what what's the what's the takeaway advice? So be a change agent, be strategic. What what does that look like day to day?
Diane Honda:Yeah, you know, a couple of things, right? It means, you know, sometimes you have to trust your instinct over what is sort of common consensus out there, right? And so if you want to be a change agent and you can't just continue to follow the path that everyone else has taken, it won't, it won't drive that transition. And there's a there's a book that I read that you know spook speaks to me and that I use quite a bit and sort of how I think about it. It's called Burn the Boats by Matt Higgins. And if you're familiar with that book at all, have you read the book?
Cecilia Ziniti:I love it. I absolutely adore it. So let's put it in the show notes. It it was it was I read it pretty early on in founding GC AI and and and I just adore it. I'd love to hear your description, but I'll I'll give mine after.
Diane Honda:Yeah, so I actually did a I did a I had everybody in the company who wanted to participate of our leaders read the book, and Matt Higgins himself came in and did a QA. It was fascinating to hear him. So if you're a fan of the book, it it was uh it was a great experience. We'll talk about that at some point. But you know, there's a couple of things in that book that I think are really important that I think whether you're in law or any form of leadership, it's great, right? And the first one is you really have to commit to a plan A. And if you have a plan B, it almost dilutes your plan A because you're almost looking back, you know, you're almost like ready to fail on your plan A and switch. Whereas if you have no way back, and that's what burn the boats is about, right? You land on the shore, you burn the boats, you're going forward, there's no way back, right? And I think that's just a great way to think about when you lean into something, you really have to fully commit. So I give that advice all the time. Like, are you really committed to this? Is this going to be your end game here? Because if it's not, and you've already started to think about your next plan, the likelihood of success on what's in front of you right now is far less than it would otherwise be, right? So I I think that is really important. And, you know, there's like this, you have to have such a strong conviction to your plan A. And that's just a theme that that I really like. You know, the other one that's really important is, and he talks about this in the book, right? Is that you can't just kind of go with the groupthink. And I have never been a groupthink person. In fact, I I sort of abore groupthink. I think it's really important to get those individual different perspectives and sometimes that one lone voice that says, I really think this that no one else was thinking about, right? Because you're in this consensus-building mode, and we all get that way in business, in law, in everything. And so you need that one disruptor to come in and be that change, you know, that that voice of, well, what about this? And, you know, I use that in just an example I'll share. I used it in in a case where we had a cybersecurity incident at my last company, right? And, you know, everybody gets in and adrenaline is high, and there's some high stakes things going on. Your data, your customer's data is potentially in harm's way. And so you you just want to find an answer to quickly fix it and move forward, right? And I put myself or I put someone else if I couldn't be in the meeting, in the role of the dissenter. But I let them know that up front. You know, I was like, hey, I'm gonna basically challenge you, not because I'm trying to slow you down, make you feel that I don't have confidence in you, but because I don't want us to get so sucked into one way of thinking that we lose our creativity and our innovative spirit and how we're gonna solve anything. Build a new business, solve a tough problem, you know, fix a process that's taking too long. So I always put sort of that that role. If I don't play it, especially in crisis situations, I think it's super important to have that. It's also important to have it when you're trying to really do innovation. So that's kind of the advice that I give. And it's kind of what I took away it from that book in you know, in part, anyways.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love it. Yeah. So the the book is like it's such a and I also think there's a concept in the book of like run your own race, right? Like, you know, I think, you know, in in your case of having gone straight to in-house from the law firm, that's you know, a a vote of faith that, like, hey, you know, I'm already doing the job, I'm at HP. I can have an outstanding you know in-house career as a lawyer, which you've done, you're not taking that path that kind of everybody thinks that you should take. That's fabulous. I hadn't heard I heard of that thought of like appoint a dissenter. So what what did this look like in a meeting? So you're meeting about this security incident and you're like, all right, you know, Jane, you're the dissenter. And is it just like, okay, we're not gonna notify or like just getting really so a lot of our listeners are our general counsels and our, you know, people that are gonna be in that moment? What should they do?
Diane Honda:Yeah, think of thinking about the unintended consequence, right? Of what you want to do. Okay, we're gonna roll this patch right now. Okay, well, what is it gonna do to potentially, you know, uh a system, right? Is it going to bring the system down? Could it break anything? What are we really thinking about? What if we don't roll this patch right now? What is the implication that way, right? You can think of many different scenarios where everybody is like, this is broken, we gotta fix it, drop it right now, right? And we've all probably done that in our career, right? Yeah, of course.
Cecilia Ziniti:And it's just like, why haven't we done this right away? No, exactly.
Diane Honda:I I I think that's and then all of a sudden something comes up that you're like, wow, that we probably need to think that through a little bit more before we did it. Right.
Cecilia Ziniti:Yeah.
Diane Honda:And you know, I think another example, I'll just pick the cyber example again, right? You know, like there's this pressure now on GCs to immediately notify when you have any sort of a cyber incident, and that's getting codified into regulations, having lived through that, right? I mean, the the instinct is yes, let's just tell them right away. And then you ask the question, what are you gonna tell them? What do you really know? Are you 100% certain that as you spend the next 48 hours really digging into this, what you know now isn't gonna change? You think it's 10 customers? What if it's 200 customers, right? What if you don't think this was implicated and then you find out that it is? You've immediately lost all your credibility in a very difficult crisis situation. So it's this really tough balance of thinking about, you know, what is the right choice? And if you don't have that dissenter there up front asking those questions, and everybody's like, okay, we have to notify, and off we go, then you're gonna re-notify with something different potentially. So how much you say, when you say it, if you don't have that person who's just kind of being the other voice, I I think you know, you can do it, but I do think it it sometimes yields a result that you don't like. So that's just kind of how we would think about it when we were in crisis mode. Or and I I use it in crisis mode because I think it's most important there. But I do think it's important in everything, right? If someone tells you you can't do something and you just say, Okay, yeah, you know, that person's really smart, I can't do it, then it doesn't happen. But if you're willing to have someone who say, Well, I think we can, and here's why, that's how progress happens.
Cecilia Ziniti:Yeah, it's it's I I just I love this this story because um definitely as a GC, your instinct is to handle it, right? Like please handle thanks kind of thing. And it and it's it's very difficult to have that that dissent. And it's actually, I I would say I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna shout out my co-founder Bardia here because his natural personality is very much dissenter. And, you know, and he's right. And in that kind of like that, I mean, I guess, conflict, Amazon embraces this too of like, you know, leaders speak up, they disagree and commit. They're gonna disagree, they're gonna have that process. And then once you're in, okay, you're gonna commit to it. It's definitely it's an important leadership point.
Diane Honda:On that, you know, sorry, and if you tell people up front, right, that I'm doing this because I want to make sure we get the best outcome here, you don't get labeled and they don't get frustrated with you. I think where people tend not to want to speak up and have that dissenting voice is because we want to be liked, we want to be nice, we want to be helpful, right? That's just our human nature. And so when everybody's ready to go and you're not the one that's with them, then there's just this conflict that nobody wants. So nobody will do it. So get permission up front to do it, and then it makes it go so much better.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. I mean, it it's also, you know, we we talk a lot about kind of the origin of the GC role, the evolution of it, being a modern GC. And this is something there, there's a book, The In-house Council Revolution, it talks about this partner guardian tension, right? So we all talk about enabling the business. But sometimes you don't want to do that, right? Sometimes you literally do need to stop and say, no, we're not gonna send this notice out now. And here's why. And it costs you some some political capital. And it's it's been fascinating to me now. That's one of the big evolutions in my own leadership journey, is that as a CEO now, seeing the other side of legal. And it's just been been fascinating where it's like, can I do this? Can I do that? Let's get this deal done. Oh, but okay, we're not gonna agree to 10x liability and all these things that at the time, you know, as legal, I knew was my job to protect. And I'm like, well, why does the CEO not care? And it's like, well, now I'm the CEO, and I'm like, well, you know, can we just get the revenues? Yeah, right.
Diane Honda:It's sort of right brain, left brain. Who do you want to shield?
Cecilia Ziniti:I talk about like the angel on my shoulder and the devil on my shoulder, and then you know, there's all kinds of like fun pop culture things you can do. But um, on that note of kind of having multiple roles, so you have legal compliance, HR, you have risk, you have security. Um, how do you uh kind of pay sufficient attention to? Your legal lens and then maybe even more career advice for folks in that scenario who want to who aspire to more from being a GC. You know, what what do you do and how do you what how do you navigate the the multiple roles?
Diane Honda:Yeah, I think it's really important, first of all, to build a super team underneath you, right? To build a team of strong leaders in and of their own right if you're going to take on a multidisciplined role. Because you to you can't spend the level of detailed time that you need in each area, especially if the company's growing or or when things are not going exactly as planned. You need somebody in the seat to really own it. And then your role becomes much more of sort of an end-to-end thinking and making sure that you kind of pull the string all the way through. Because it it's just human nature again. We suboptimize within each of our areas, right? So, you know, sometimes I'll hear things like, oh, well, you know, HR is doing this because legal said so. And I said, Well, did you tell them what that meant to you, that legal decision? And they'll be like, Well, no. How would they know then? Right. So I find myself kind of pulling the end-to-end thread and kind of making sure that we haven't suboptimized along the way. And I can only do that if I have strong people doing the right thing in their function. To your point, Satilia, right? At some point, a lawyer is going to say, I'm not going to take that risk with this employee termination, right? But then on the HR side, there's not much more they can do at this point, right? And so someone, you know, and they each did the right thing in their role, right? That's what you want. Strong people in each function. So your role becomes a little bit more strategic and a little bit more end-to-end. And if you like that, and that's the challenge you like, and you're not the really detail-oriented person, then these multi-function roles are great for you. If you're really detail-oriented and you love sort of the complexities of the details, it's a harder role because you have to let go of some of those details and let the very capable function leader you hired to work with you take that responsibility.
Cecilia Ziniti:This is like if you're if you're listening to this on audio instead of video, I'm just like nodding my head so hard because it's the same journey now as CEO, where it's literally like, you know, I had the functions that I that I came up in. And then, you know, in in our case at GC AI, you know, I I was at GC, so I'm pretty in touch with customers. But thinking of like pulling myself out of the detail and like literally letting go and like hiring the best, like that this this is my charter for for the year and for forever. And by the way, plug, we're always hiring. But anyways, um, very good, good, very good advice, Diane. Thank you. Any other fun stories when you look back on like what were some kind of pivotal moments in your career? Put us in your shoes when you were figuring out what role would allow you to kind of pull that string, which I I love that metaphor.
Diane Honda:Yeah, you know, it was it was a journey, and I would say it was somewhat intentional. Like everything's somewhat intentional and somewhat luck, right? And there's always sort of a moment when you think about, well, what if this had happened and what would it where would that have taken you to? There's another great book that I could tell you about where there's a pivotal moment in a person's life that changed the trajectory. You know, some people are fortunate enough to have that for many of us. I think it's just a series of decisions we make and the outcomes of them that bring us there. So when I when I did finish my my technical undergraduate, you know, I I contemplated what job, what company to go to. And I thought I'm originally from New York and no one in my family was in California. And I just thought, all right, I'm gonna take the chance. He'll made me this offer, and and it was a great opportunity to work for a company and move within different departments right away. And I think if I hadn't done that initial role and I'd gone to a smaller company that didn't give me the opportunity to start as a software engineer, move into a QA role. And then, you know, we we got ready to launch this software product that was going to be used by every division of HP worldwide. And they said, Well, you did all the testing. Why don't you go and install it everywhere? So I got to travel to all the different manufacturing and offices everywhere to help them sort of train and bring up this new this new software product. And so I never really saw myself moving into that role that quickly, but it was such a great opportunity. It threw me right into the business side of things. And then, you know, I had the chance to run teams. I and because HP was so big, you know, I I think that's really important for new people coming out of school, you know, the opportunity to work in a big company and see how all of it works is just so transformative when you're that young and you're coming out. So I think, you know, when I think about the the the place where I grew the most was when I was at HP. I was there for almost 12 years, right? And it took on a whole bunch of roles. I started in software, I went into business, I worked in channel marketing, I worked in legal, I worked in our financing organization, doing leases, loans, convertible debt, right? I was, you know, we had hardware equipment. We went and had, you know, we sent out repossession people when they weren't paying for it, right? Like, like you just saw so many things in a in a role like that that really then allowed me to say, okay, now I want to go be a GC. I need to leave HP. That's not an easy path for me at a company that big. I need to go find a series of roles that got me to different, different experiences. So one company had a lot of litigation, one company had, you know, IP challenges, right? And so I went to a series of companies. One was SaaS, one was hardware. So it really broadened out sort of all the issues and things we would be facing. And then I picked up HR along the way. And that allowed me to sort of think about, which I think for every lawyer should realize is that companies are people, right? And the better your people are, the more happy they are, the more they care about the business, the less risk they take, the more they talk to you. So it allowed me to sort of take two things I really, really care for and and and love, you know, successful business operations and people and bring those together, right? And so, you know, I think if you think about it that way from a uh a pure legal progression, like what is that area that's adjacent to it that you really care about, go there first. But if you can get an experience working at a bigger company and try a few different things, it really can set your perspective to be that much broader thinker than just sort of what you would come out and otherwise have exposure to.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. I love that. But any favorite case or deal that you worked on in your career, or one that one that stands out and maybe it was a take private, maybe it was IPO, I don't I don't know.
Diane Honda:You know, I was in a I did an IP case in Texas when Texas had the monopoly, right, on it. And it was in trial and w there were multiple tech defendants, right? It was sort of like it was a standards-based case, so there were many of us in this case, and everybody was quickly settling out, and it was sort of my turn to settle out, and and what they wanted to settle for was just too much. And so, you know, I saw the judge, I don't have that level of authority, I can't do it. And he's like, Come with me. I'll leave off the rest of it because it was a little bit, you know, sort of think of Texas, you know, many years ago. And he's like, Here, go in here and call and get the authority. And literally, he opens up his like broom closet in the judge's chambers, right? Trying to settle this case. And I'm calling the CFO and I just remember saying to him, look, I maybe we should just, you know, we can go this high. I think they'll settle for this amount. And you have to do this because I'm in a broom closet and I may not get out of Texas if you want to agree to this, right? And so, you know, he's like, do what you have to do. And so, but I was annoyed that I got pushed to a higher thing than I wanted. So when I walked out, I said, look, I got you your number, but I'm paying it over three years. And I was the only defendant in that case to actually get a time-based payment for it because I was just so annoyed that he kind of pushed me into a broom closet to call my to call my boss to get more, you know, something.
Cecilia Ziniti:That's amazing. That's amazing. So we're we're like, we're like uh, you know, super modern, you know, arbitration mediation, mediation practice here of like put one of the parties in a closet. And I remember I did a lot of that's how we settled it. That's amazing. Well, good good work. Um, and you know, I I think uh on the on the patent side it's been interesting to see that that evolve. But awesome. Okay, so um, all right, so shifting to the lightning round. We talked about um the book uh that shaped you is uh Burn the Boats. Any other books, podcasts, or anything that that that have good insight?
Diane Honda:Uh you know, I just read a book and the author is escaping me. It's called The Diamond Eye. Have you read that book?
Cecilia Ziniti:I don't know.
Diane Honda:It's about a Russian female sniper and her record and and how she was amazingly successful. I guess, although in war it's hard to think about success, but she was amazingly um capable and how she got to the place where she was actually leading and training other snipers. And, you know, kind of back to your earlier question, why I thought about that book is because there was a moment in time when she was at a shooting range with her husband and her young son, and the and the husband sort of mocked her inability to fire the gun properly, right? Wow. And at that moment in time, she determined that she was going to learn to be a marksman, and she went and religiously became a marksman long before the war ever broke out, right? And, you know, it was that moment in time that forced her to go do something that then she never knew she she would have never known she had that talent, and then she ultimately got drafted in as a sniper because that she was a senior a senior marksman based on that one event, one day that sort of pushed her into it. So it's a fascinating book, The Diamond Eye. It's a it's great. And it's uh it's interesting and it's it's a quick read and it's it's not our typical legal or leadership reading. So I do try every now and then to pick up a book that's just purely unrelated to what we do. And that was just a fun one I just recently read.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. As we wrap up, if somebody listens to this conversation, what's what's the takeaway about how how how Diane leads?
Diane Honda:I think, you know, I always say I have a bias towards action, and I think it's a really important, you know, way to just sort of be, right? I'm gonna, when someone gives me an opportunity, I generally don't say no. Like it would be hard for me to say no to something because I'm always wanting to sort of take things to the next level. And so I just tell people to embrace this time and this change and lean into it, right? It's uh I mean there's a there's a quote that, you know, um that Wayne Greske says, right? You miss 100% of the shots you never take. And, you know, the other thing that I would say is that, you know, you're gonna fall, but you gotta just get up and keep going, right? And so to me, it's like lean in, don't be afraid of the fall, and just, you know, know that it's gonna happen, learn from it, and keep going. And and that's just that's I think how you have fun and whatever you're doing, your career, your life, your family, just take that. That's my philosophy that I would share with others.
Cecilia Ziniti:I love that. Thank you, Diane. And you've shared so much great insight from the GC role to career evolution to marksman books and to a the AI frontier. I'm so into it. Where can uh listeners reach out if they want to connect or follow your work? And are you hiring at Redis?
Diane Honda:I'm on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out. I love to stay connected to people and learn from others. And then we are absolutely hiring at Redis right now, so you should check out our career pages. We are always looking for great talent.
Cecilia Ziniti:Amazing. All right. Hey, thanks so much, Diane. This was really a joy. It was really fun to get to know you a little bit more, and I'm excited for our listeners to hear. Likewise. That was my conversation with Diane Honda, an engineer, lawyer, and executive, redefining strategic legal leadership in the age of AI. And she dropped so many truth bombs, wisdom nuggets. I am just high energy for the rest of the day from that. So if you're navigating scale, trust, or expectations of today's legal, I hope you've this episode sparked a new way of thinking for you. You can follow CZ and Friends wherever you get your podcasts, subscribe to our newsletter at gc.ai/newsletter. And get guest updates, behind the scenes insights, and practical tools for the next generation. Thanks for listening.