The Truth Is with Kathryn Flaschner

Tazin Khan: Are You Doing This for Ego or Impact?

Episode Summary

Tazin Khan is the founder and CEO of Cyber Collective, a nonprofit making digital safety education accessible, human, and community rooted. In this conversation, she traces the through line from growing up Bengali in post-9/11 Virginia, to translating immigration documents in fourth grade, to building an organization the industry was never going to build for itself — and what it actually means to do that work without losing yourself in it.

Episode Notes

Tazin Khan is a cyber risk strategist, digital rights advocate, and the founder and CEO of Cyber Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to making digital safety education accessible, human, and community rooted. Her work is driven by a simple but urgent belief: everybody deserves to experience the internet without harm.

That belief didn't come from a boardroom. It came from growing up Bengali in post-9/11 Virginia as one of the only Muslim families for miles. From translating immigration documents in fourth grade. From living in and out of her car at nineteen while working three jobs and meeting a stranger who she emailed every month until she got hired. From watching her father get scammed on Facebook and realizing the gap between what the industry knows and what the people most at risk are ever taught.

Tazin has spent over 13 years in cybersecurity — across Fortune 10 companies, government agencies, and grassroots organizing — and what she's built with Cyber Collective is something the industry was never going to build for itself. A community-rooted, feminine-designed organization that meets people where they are and asks the questions the sector would rather not answer.

This conversation goes deep into all of it.

We talk about:

• Growing up bicultural and what it taught her about empathy, translation, and pushing back
• The Michael Kors moment that changed the direction of her life
• What she learned — and what she couldn't unsee — in corporate cybersecurity
• Why the internet's harms are not the user's fault and what accountability actually looks like
• Building Cyber Collective: the vision, the near-burnout, and what's coming
• Feminine design principles and what it looks like to run an org aligned to your body and your values
• The question she asks herself constantly: am I doing this for ego or for impact
• What proximity to power does to you and how she stays honest about it
• Why to get far, sometimes you have to stop

What stayed with me after this conversation is that Tazin is doing exactly what this show believes is possible: taking the most personal work and turning it outward. Her story is her methodology. And her methodology is changing what the internet is allowed to do to the people it was never designed to protect.

ABOUT TAZIN KHAN 

Tazin Khan is the founder and CEO of Cyber Collective, a nonprofit making digital safety education accessible, human, and community rooted. With over 13 years of experience spanning Fortune 10 companies, government agencies, and grassroots organizing, her work has reached more than 5.5 million people globally. She holds a master's from NYU and has been featured in Forbes, Harper's Bazaar, People Magazine, and on CNN.

Tazin on Instagram | Cyber Collective

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CREDITS

Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner

Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume

 Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com

 Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush

 Advised by Natalie Tulloch