You may know Robert Herjavec, chief executive and founder of the Herjavec Group, as the shark investor on ABC’s Shark Tank. But he began his career in the technology sector, and today his company is one of the largest information security providers in the world.

Herjavec and Atif Ghauri, senior vice president at the Herjavec Group, were at the Splunk .conf 2016 conference in Orlando, FL, this week to speak about cybersecurity and data transformation. The two sat down with John Furrier (@furrier) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about celebrity, ugly Christmas sweaters and cybersecurity. Herjavec is theCUBE‘s Guest of the Week. (*Disclosure below.)

Humble beginnings

Walls opened the interview by asking Herjavec to talk about his company and why its focus is cybersecurity. He addressed the early years when things didn’t begin as expected and explained the company’s growth.

“I’ve been in the security business for about 30 years. I actually helped bring a product called Check Point to Canada — firewalls, URL filtering, that kind of stuff. And we started this company [Herjavec Group] 12 years ago, and our vision was to do managed services … and we thought we’d do $5 million in sales in our first year, and we did $400,000. The market just wasn’t there,” he explained.

“Sim technology, log aggregation wasn’t what it is today. I think at the time it was Envision and our [first company] BRAK Systems that was really the first go-to-market sim. … So our initial business became around log aggregation, security, writing parsers, and then over time it grew and took us five years to get to $6 million in sales. And we’ll see $170 million this year. We went from a Canadian company to a global entity. We do a lot of business in the states, UK, Australia, everyone,” he said.

Invest in tech or the ugly Christmas sweater?

Furrier remarked that the Internet is creating a great deal of entrepreneurs in the enterprise.

“We’ve always been in the enterprise business, so we are seeing a lot of growth in that area,” Herjavec said. “A lot of VC [venture capitalists] money is going into that area because you can measure that level of return and you can go and get those customers. But on our show, we’re a bubble. We don’t do a lot of tech deals, like we’re talking [about], because it’s boring TV.”

Not that tech products are boring, he added. “Tech people love tech, consumers love the benefit of tech,” he said. “No consumer opens up their iPhone and says, ‘Oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my iPhone.’ They just love their iPhone. And our show is really a consumer platform. What we have learned is … we don’t invest in tech anymore. We invest in slippers, ugly Christmas sweaters, food products, because if you can tap into that consumer base, you’re good to go.”

Data is tough to value

Furrier asked Herjavec to put a price on data. He responded by saying that he feels its only worth as much as a company values it.

“I don’t think that data has any value. It’s the effect of the data that has value, and its very singular. It’s what somebody does to it. Whatever that data is worth to you from a business perspective, its worth fundamentally more to an outside bad party because they can package that data and sell it to a competitor, a foreign government, all those kind of places. So it’s the collection of raw data and applying it to something that has meaning to a third party,” he said.

“I don’t see it on the balance sheet as a hard core value because it has to have a transformative value. You have to do something with it,” Herjavec concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf 2016.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE was the paid media partner at .conf. Neither Splunk nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE content.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE