Employee Spotlight: Rick Wootten, VP of Marketing

This week our team is thrilled to welcome Rick Wootten, Nightfall AI’s new Chief Marketing Officer. With over 15 years of experience building and leading global marketing teams, Rick specializes in driving demand, revenue, and customer loyalty through marketing excellence and brand innovation. Read on to learn more about Rick’s distinguished career, his hopes for Nightfall, his thoughts on AI, and more.

From Cloudflare to SentinelOne, you’ve spearheaded marketing teams across several leading security companies. What drew you to the security industry initially? 

Through the early part of my career, I worked as a consultant in various agencies. However, I wanted to do something for the greater good of humanity, and thought that the security industry offered an opportunity to do just that. I made a career move from Palm to SonicWALL, where we were building next-generation firewalls—and I’ve been in security ever since. 

As I’ve worked in the security industry, I’ve loved helping companies grow. I have a real passion for the David and Goliath story, and guiding small companies to overcome big companies. For SonicWALL, it was Cisco and Juniper. For Cloudflare, it was AWS. At each of these places, it was really fun being a part of companies that were pushing stagnant industries forward. That’s precisely how I see Nightfall: As a company that has the potential to disrupt and innovate the DLP space. Especially after meeting Rohan and Isaac, I got really excited to be a part of that disruption.

You saw the impact of AI on marketing firsthand during your time at 24[7] AI. What do you think are the top advantages (and disadvantages) of incorporating AI into employee workflows?

With any new technology, including AI, you build the concept first and take a little time to find the right use cases. More importantly, you need to make it approachable for the mass market. While AI has been around for a long time, it’s been difficult and expensive to build, which makes it less approachable. However, in the last five to ten years, that’s shifted. Price points are more accessible. AI has come of age. It’s matured enough for many companies—specifically startups—to leverage. 

From my perspective, I see huge potential for generative AI (GenAI) to transform how marketers work. For instance, a marketer could ask ChatGPT to draw on its large volumes of data to determine what their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) should be. But that’s just one thing—it can do so much more. It’s an enabling technology, and has an immense capability for problem solving. Just like the web, though, it comes with risks and concerns. 

One of the biggest risks for marketers is that they might share something they shouldn’t share, and then it goes into the public domain. People need to be familiar with GenAI tools to know what they should or shouldn’t be doing. With Nightfall, we can help marketers—among many other professions—to prevent their sensitive data from being sent to GenAI apps like ChatGPT. We do this by intercepting sensitive data and remediating it in real time. Nightfall for ChatGPT is an essential tool for companies looking to safely adopt AI technologies.

With all this talk about AI, what was it that drew you to Nightfall?

When I look at competitors—especially large competitors—in the DLP industry, I feel like they’re settling by having a “good enough” solution. Microsoft Purview is a good example; they have a solution that focuses on network DLP as a way of “checking the box.” But they don’t address the limitations of network DLP, and I don’t see them focusing on that. They’re fine with having a “good enough” solution.

One of the things that got me excited about Nightfall is that it’s a category-defining product that has AI woven into its DNA. I wanted to be a part of a company that was disrupting the industry and creating a better solution for the market—and Nightfall is using AI to do just that.

On top of your work in marketing, you’re also a podcast founder and host. What was the inspiration to start “Rick & Rick Rule the World”?

I’ve known my co-host, Rick Mathieson, for a little more than 20 years. He worked for an agency that I was a client for. We became friends very quickly, and found that we’d talk for hours on topics ranging from marketing to technology to pop culture. One day, our coworkers jokingly said that they’d listen to us rambling on a podcast. It inspired us to give it a try—and that was five years and 150 episodes ago. 

Do you have a dream guest? Who is it and why?

Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s at the nexus of science and entertainment. He’s blowing peoples’ minds by putting things into perspective. He’s challenging our way of thinking about things. 

You’ve built a career that combines your passions for security, marketing, pop culture, and more. What advice would you give to aspiring marketers who are looking to forge their own path, as you have?

The best marketers are people who do what they love. My first piece of advice is to make sure you’re working on something that you’re excited about. When you have a passion for something, you can make the biggest impact in the world, while at the same time being happy with what you’re doing. 

My second piece of advice is to develop your self-awareness. It’s important to always keep learning. Look around at what other people are doing in the marketing space. What inspires you about them? Can you do something better? 

Finally, while it can be helpful to have a mentor, you shouldn’t wait for them or your manager to drive your career for you. Remember that you’re the one driving your own career path.