The Technology Leaders Podcast

A handful of genuinely useful data points surface (CISO penetration, security staffing levels, community self-generation threshold) but they are buried under extensive company background, personal career narration, and the co-host's long self-referential anecdotes. The insight-per-minute rate is low.

“only 15 of, of the mid market has a CISO and you know, most of it still is reporting into the, into the cio. They might have. I think it's. On average, our audience has one and a half dedicated security IT professionals.”

“there was a certain point when we got past like 500 attendees that people start posting their own stuff”

The AI-is-the-new-cloud comparison is well-worn, and the 'mid-market is underserved' thesis is common in the space. Mildly original is the deliberate carve-out of an IT-leaders-only sub-space within the community to buy trust, and the positioning against Spiceworks as a different audience tier.

“they said, look, we, we know you're going to fund it with advertising dollars. We get that. We want to talk to vendors. We do, but we want to have our own space also”

“Spiceworks tends to be very developer focused, very, very technical or they were... down a level or two”

Adam Dennison has 20+ years in high-tech B2B media and runs an active mid-market IT community and events platform, giving him genuine observational data on mid-market trends. However, he is a media and events executive, not a practitioner CIO or technology operator who has personally driven outcomes at scale.

“I stayed there for about 13 years. Um, I worked my way up to publisher of the CIO brand, was uh, running their US events”

“we do twice annual state of the mid market Research. So it's kind of helpful to have, have Gartner there”

The episode does supply concrete definitional criteria, community size figures, and named anecdotes (Atlanta law firm, NYC dinner), but most data is observational/anecdotal rather than sourced from rigorous research, and several numbers lack methodology context.

“when we say mid market we mean um, 50 million to 2 billion in revenue... 100 to 2,500. And then when we think about it in terms of an IT department, 5 to 50”

“we have over 800 um, qualified IT leaders in that network”

The host's questions are almost entirely broad openers ('tell us about X') with no follow-up or challenge; the co-host repeatedly commandeers the floor with lengthy personal stories rather than probing the guest. The obvious sponsor relationship (Soligo is a paying client of the guest's company) further suppresses any critical questioning.

“could you tell us just a little bit about your journey to becoming the vice president”

“That is fantastic. Thank you for that intro. Um, and just to kick us off slightly into second gear”