Levena Bailey Made My Day

One of our newest members at Wisegate is Levena Bailey. She is the senior director of enterprise security at Hilton Worldwide (you know, that little hotel company).

Levena has the honor of being the person in the info security industry that the most Wisegate members had told me I HAD to meet, and who we HAD to get as a member. Well, after several members had told her about Wisegate, I recently got a chance to visit with her (along with Bill Burns of Netflix and Denny Dean of a big insurance company who doesn’t like their name mentioned publicly.)

After spending a little time telling her about who we are and what we are up to (and showing her the site) she wrapped up our call by saying to me (I paraphrase), “I want to thank you for what you are doing. I don’t often hear someone who is so passionate about what they are doing. And, we really need this in our industry. So, thank you.”

Not an exact quote, but that is the gist of it.

I told my husband. I told the team. I told our board. I had a glass or two of wine to bask in the afterglow (haha!).

Never in my entire career have I been thanked for what I am doing. Not once. I understand; I started on Wall Street doing M&A, which doesn’t conjure up a lot of warm and fuzzy sentiments. And in my last two start-ups, I was a vendor hawking a software product. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Today, I am so glad to be building Wisegate – because I do believe in it and that makes it fun to get up and go to work each day.

Levena Bailey made my day.