Jan 2, 2019 · 37m · a16z
a16z Podcast | The Fundamentals of Security and the Story of Tanium’s Growth
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In an Andreessen Horowitz podcast episode, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz interviews Tanium co-founder Orion Hindawi about the flaws in legacy enterprise cybersecurity, the critical importance of basic security hygiene, and how Tanium built a real-time endpoint management platform to secure complex corporate networks.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 5.2 Guest disagreement 1.9 The host pushing back 1.7
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 29:42 Dismissing point solution vendor complexity claims
Orion directly rejects the argument of point solution vendors, asserting they intentionally make simple problems sound complicated merely to validate their commercial existence.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 2:37 Challenging 5-year R&D durationBen refuses to passively accept scale as a justification for a 5-year R&D cycle, pointing out that Orion's team had already built a similar product at BigFix.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 11:38 Exposing 1,500 hidden network exitsOrion educates the host on perimeter security blind spots by recounting how a telecom client boasting 22 heavily guarded entry points actually had 1,500 unmanaged exits built by employees.
The host holds their own ▶ 9:46 Framing IBM's incumbent disadvantageBen demonstrates sharp industry acumen by recognizing that Orion's chief competitor, IBM, is disadvantaged because it sells software Orion himself designed as an 18-year-old.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Architectural Flaws of Legacy Hub-and-Spoke Models | 5 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Ben Horowitz pushes on why building Tanium required five years of R&D when the team had already built BigFix, prompting Orion to explain the edge cases of refactoring topology for decentralized encryption. Ben demonstrates domain familiarity with enterprise software scale and development complexity. | |
| Endpoint Visibility in High-Profile Cyber Breaches | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Orion gently reframes Ben's specific question about Home Depot to discuss breach post-mortems generally, explaining how Tanium bridges the gap between security urgency and operational ROI. | |
| Competing Against Legacy Tech and Market Incumbents | 6 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Ben highlights the M&M security metaphor and IBM's legacy tech monetization. Orion educates on perimeter failures, referencing a major telco that thought it had 22 entrances but had 1,500 unmanaged internet paths. | |
| Prioritizing Basic Cybersecurity Hygiene Over Cloak-and-Dagger | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Ben asks why the industry over-indexes on perimeter defense over endpoint hygiene. Orion criticizes fluffy analytics tools and explains that security founders prefer sexier spy-thriller problems over basic patch management. | |
| Pilot Deployments and Uncovering Unused Software Savings | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Orion details how pilot deployments uncover unused software licenses, allowing customers to self-fund Tanium from operational savings. Ben quickly grasps the economic model, quipping that it is great for customers but bad for Microsoft. | |
| Real-Time Detection and Reducing Attacker Dwell Time | 4 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Ben asks whether Tanium can prevent all malware from entering. Orion clarifies that total prevention is an illusion against modern targeted attacks, shifting the goal to reducing attacker dwell time to seconds. | |
| Balancing System Performance and Eliminating Professional Services | 5 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Ben notes that Orion's zero-services strategy crashes IBM's enterprise software business model. Orion details why professional services create a moral hazard by incentivizing buggy and complex software. | |
| Expanding Addressable Market Through Platform Extensibility | 5 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Ben plays devil's advocate for point-solution vendors that claim deep specialization. Orion sharply rejects their premise, stating point vendors inflate complexity to justify their existence when platform modules can solve the same problems with far less code. | |
| Audience Q&A: Mobile Device Management and Hardware Integration | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 | During audience Q&A, Orion breaks down why Mobile Device Management is flawed due to Apple's consumer-focused sandbox philosophy, explaining Tanium's strategy to integrate direct chip-level management with Intel and Qualcomm. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Tanium executes endpoint tasks in seconds compared to legacy systems
“I mean, it takes them days to do what we can do in seconds because they're still doing it the way that you would if you had 5000 things instead of 500,000.”
Tanium took 12 engineers five years to build from scratch
“And so we knew the problems with the old way, and they knew what they have to build, and it still took us five years with 12 engineers to do it, because there's a lot of grunt lifting in rebuilding something from the ground up.”
Tanium was bought by eight of the top ten breached companies
“Out of the top 10 breaches that have happened in the last year, we've been bought by eight of them, and we're in procurement with the other two.”
Tanium has closed multiple enterprise deals valued over $10 million
“We've got now four or five, 10 plus million dollar deals from very large environments who don't spend that much on software typically”
Tanium is targeting a $20 billion total addressable market
“Because I like my twenty billion dollar TAM that's being prosecuted by, like, seventy-year-old gray hairs at IBM.”
IBM's competing product relies on technology Hindawi invented at age 18
“You're buying something if you buy it from IBM that I invented when I was 18 years old and had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and you can either do that or buy the product that I had 15 years of learning that I put into with, You know, a much newer archi…”
A major telco spent $7 million annually protecting 22 network perimeters
“We work with one of the biggest telcos in the world, and when we got there, they told us they had exactly 22 ways into their network, and they were spending seven million dollars a year protecting each one of them. They'd bought Every solution. They layered it…”
Corporate networks no longer have true perimeters
“And the problem is the perimeter has dissolved to the point where, so cloud by definition has no perimeter. Corporate networks they're finding out don't really have a perimeter either.”
Network perimeters reduce noise rather than providing absolute security
“And I think they've all realized that the perimeter is not a protective mechanism. What it is useful for is reducing noise, and it's useful because you can block a lot. You're not going to block everything, but you can block a lot. And it's useful for being ab…”
Security teams chase five-minute attacks using three-day-old data
“And the problem for many of our customers is they're playing whack-a-mole, right? They're chasing attackers, and they're using three-day-old data to chase attackers that are moving every five minutes.”
Basic endpoint security hygiene accounts for only 5% of cybersecurity budgets
“You cut out antivirus and all the legacy stuff that's 20 years old, right, you cut out the network side, you're looking at, you know, whatever it is, five percent of the spend that's left.”
A majority of Fortune 100 companies use Tanium
“And what we now have is the preponderance of the Fortune 100 who are using us, who can demonstrate that they're becoming more secure by following really block and tackle things.”
Tanium forces every potential customer to complete a pilot deployment
“Every customer goes through a pilot. We force them to.”
A credit card processor deployed Tanium to 100,000 endpoints in three days
“We had a credit card processor recently go to a 100,000 computers in three days and pilot. They basically said, you know, we'll push it out until we run into roadblocks. They globally deployed in three days.”
Tanium uncovered hundreds of unused SQL Server licenses during a pilot
“We could also show them that they had hundreds of copies of SQL Server that were installed that they weren't using, that they were paying for. Hundreds of copies of SQL Server is hundreds of thousands of dollars a year of spend. And they started really delving…”
Five well-known lines of code can bypass FireEye's security tools
“And so, you know, you look at FireEye, there are five lines of code that are well known that get you around FireEye. You look at Emmet, you look at a lot of these tools that are preventative, there are known ways to get around them.”
Cybersecurity teams should prioritize fast anomaly detection over perimeter prevention
“Trying to prevent every angle in is not a valuable way to spend your time. The right way to spend your time is instrument your environment so that you can see that things are going wrong before they become really damaging.”
Software requiring heavy professional services is fundamentally a bad product
“So, if you come from a services background, you treat services as a revenue stream. You start building products that require lots of services, and that's a bad product. Like, it turns out that that's almost the definition of a bad product, is it's really heavy…”
Tanium built its enterprise forensics module with four engineers in six months
“It turns out that we built a forensics product with four engineers in six months. The reason is 95% of the work was already done when we architected the platform.”
The Mobile Device Management market is broken due to OS vendors
“The answer for you is that MDM, at least in my estimation, is a pretty broken market today, and the reason it's broken is the vendors of the platforms that provide, you know, Google, Microsoft, Apple, really Apple is kind of the real, real offender here. They …”