Emerging Entrepreneurs Awards: Maggie Louie and the music of cybersecurity

Maggie Louie is the co-founder and CEO of DEVCON.

Courtesy DEVCON

By John Klyce - Reporter

February 26, 2021, 02:50pm CST Updated 08/16/2021 5:24 pm

As I spoke to Maggie Louie on the phone, I could hear her spoon scraping against a bowl of clam chowder.

“I realized about 20 minutes ago that I haven’t looked up [from work] since 3 o’clock this morning, and figured I should probably eat something,” Louie said. “I apologize for eating on a call.”

You could hardly blame her. Louie had recently returned from a month-long business trip to Costa Rica and would be in São Paulo, Brazil, just a few days later.

She’s the cofounder and CEO of DEVCON — soon to be branded as Otto by DEVCON — a Memphis-based cybersecurity startup that keeps her busy.

Founded in 2017, Otto by DEVCON has about $5.5 million in funding and has both weathered, and gained inspiration, from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But, Louie’s company, at first glance, stands in stark contrast to the work she did earlier in her career.

Louie started as a singer with Delta Records in the 1990s, and she recorded six albums. Then, in 2000, when her lead guitarist and musician partner died, she left that business and went into the only industry that would take her: journalism.

She worked as a writer, photographer, and editor at various publications before being hired by the E.W. Scripps Co., where she shifted into digital product development, at a time when newsrooms were struggling to adapt to an increasingly technological age.

In 2011, she left to work on digital offerings for The Los Angeles Times. It was here that she learned about the intricacies of advertising technology — the heavy reliance on digital ad revenue, the causes of performance problems, and the ways to trouble shoot them.

At one point, she even helped a friend’s business (she couldn’t disclose the name) realize an internal developer was siphoning off portions of its ad revenue, an event that further drove her toward the creation of DEVCON in 2017.

Since its inception, the company has grown and evolved.

Initially, its focus was on fixing network security issues within the ad tech and marketing tech ecosystem.

“Hackers were able to exploit the ads themselves and use the ad tech and mar tech channels to distribute attacks,” Louie explained.

DEVCON developed a solution, which is now patented. But, the company realized that issues in the advertising agency represented just 5% of a much larger problem, especially in regards to third-party website security.

“Essentially, everything’s connected,” she said. “Anything that’s connected has dependencies of dynamic code — meaning, it’s not a code you wrote. It’s like a snippet of code, that’s going to … load code someone else wrote. You’ve got this big security gap that goes undetected, unmonitored, and undefended.”

To address larger issues, the company has expanded its software and released a suite of developer tools.

It has also, amid COVID, turned its attention to a changing world.

As e-commerce booms, more and more storefronts are creating online sites, often through platforms such as Shopify or Wix.com.

But, many of these brick-and-mortar business owners aren’t technologically savvy and are ripe for cyberattack opportunities.

To mitigate these issues, DEVCON has developed a series of easy-to-use applications for businesses launching digital shops.

“It’s something affordable that will support small businesses as they struggle to survive in the digital environment,” Louie said. “To be able to create ubiquity in an easy, no-code, plug-in solution for those mom and pop businesses just felt like not only great business but something that was behind our mission: democratizing security.”