383- Rebuilding executive trust after $1.2M ransomware demand w/Ray Martin

You've Been Heard

Philip Howard

Technology, Tech News, Management, News, Business

5 • 49 Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ray Martin started his IT career in a basement cage, setting up Blackberries behind a locked door. Ten years later, he's the CTO at Dimeo Construction—and he's survived two ransomware attacks.The first one fractured trust between IT and operations. The second one? Conti demanded $1.2 million in Bitcoin. Ray counter-offered $10K "so I don't have to go through the trouble." They said no. He recovered everything anyway.In this episode, Ray breaks down exactly how his isolated Azure tenant backup strategy saved the company, why your 200+ subcontractors running Gmail are your biggest security vulnerability, and what it took to convince leadership to migrate to the cloud when the Exchange server was down 80% of the time.We also get into real AI use cases in construction—why Procore flipped their agent strategy from 80% vendor-built to 80% customer-built, how to survey your team before rolling out AI policy, and Simon Sinek's take on why blue collar jobs are safe while white collar jobs aren't.Plus: the conspiracy corner, NJ drones, and why every Flat Earth experiment proves the Earth is round.

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right. We are live.
0:12.2	Mr. Martin.
0:13.3	Welcome to the show.
0:16.0	Learner, restorative, achiever, competition, belief.
0:19.1	Those are your five things on LinkedIn.
0:21.3	Maybe we would just start off with your ask. Well, first of all, that is a Bruins rink. So that's near and dear
0:27.5	to my heart. I think we talked last time about, you know, I went to Colorado State University.
0:31.8	We gave Ray Bork a few titles. That was kind of a fun time going to college at the time,
0:37.1	being a kid from
0:37.7	Worcester, Wistamass. So obviously you're hockey fans. Let's start with the most important stuff.
0:44.1	Yeah, now big Bruins fan, born and raised in Rhode Island. The irony of the whole thing is I was a goalie
0:50.6	growing up. So my favorite player of all time was Patrick Wugh. So being a Bruins fan and my favorite player playing for the Canadians for the early
1:00.2	part of my childhood was a little tough.
1:02.3	But when he got traded to Colorado, it was fun watching them, especially some dark time
1:06.8	for the bees then.
1:08.5	So cheering him on and watch him win the cup cup and Ray Bart going over there and winning one
1:12.5	with them. It was fun and obviously watching the massacres when they played the Red Wings
1:17.5	was time. So that was my prime watching those. But no, it's always great. A huge hockey fan,
1:23.5	still am. I love going to the games. And obviously, being a Boston sports fan, my senior year,
1:30.8	and then through my college years, and during the 20 years of the title runs, it can be a
1:35.8	better time to enjoy that. We're smashing, we're already smashing stereotypes. See,
1:41.6	IT people are cool and do sports.
	...

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