The Ledger, every show

“When they grow up, they're going to take over more and more of our tasks. And allow the repetitive task to go away so you can apply yourself to new unique problems. But I think there's a long time coming.”

“I think the challenge right now is that if you're building a wrapper effectively as an AI, as a service company, and all your wrapper does is enhance the capabilities of a model or put some guardrails around it, then your biggest risk is the model slowly expan…”

“Like there's no genius in building a firewall. Every firewall within plus or -10% does the same thing.”

“So I think over time, what you'll see is the platform approach is going to sort of Eat into these feature approach that's happening.”

“Now, you know, when I started seven years ago, the average time to identify a target, get through it and exfiltrate data was in the three to four day timeframe. The fastest we see right now is 23 minutes.”

“I've seen, if I'm coding agent, find a vulnerability and security code at Palo Alto, which we wouldn't have found unless it was out in the wild, which is a good thing for us.”

“That'd be about 27 companies so far. We're about to buy our largest one if we get approval to get it done.”

“We think most future wars, as you can see the current wars that are in play are part cyber wars and part technology wars, right? People are trying to figure out the lowest cost way to create instability, chaos, and destruction of life and property without It c…”

“And the first thing that happened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict was the entire logistics systems of Ukraine was taken down by hackers because that was the way they could sort of destabilize and immobilize the army of Ukraine. It wasn't a bomb that landed. It …”

“When quantum comes about, it'll break every key, which is true. It will break every key that is there today.”

“The most likely categories which will see outsized returns are categories where a new attack vector is being born. And there are many ideas about how to secure the attack vector, and many people are experimenting.”

“I don't think most enterprises or human beings are ready to give an AI agent control.”

“So there are all kinds of different examples from control systems to industrial systems to robotic systems you can think of, which eventually will want agency, and they will become an interesting place for bad actors to try and take control because those agent…”

“The whole mode of interaction of me with your payroll system may be fundamentally different, and you're ahead of HR, and that might be different, but the system of record will stay, because it's required as part of your business process to exist. Now, a system…”

“So I think the act of wrapping these models or brains with useful things that we wanted to do will be where the art will be, and which is what I think our mutual friend is talking about, building applications around them, perhaps.”

“The fact that people are raising money, you know, the companies have raised money at two billion dollars six months ago, raising money at four billion dollars right now is unprecedented. You've never heard that degree of development and conviction that is happ…”

“Failure is not as easily accepted anywhere in the world, but in Silicon Valley. Yeah. There are founders here who had companies fail and started second company and third company. There are founders who, you know, done something wrong, come back and started com…”

“We don't want to buy customer bases. We want to buy products which we can integrate and sell them to our customer base.”

“Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, throwing out open source models, he keeps them honest and fair everywhere around there, so we'll all get access to these models”

“Our view on acquisitions is we buy innovation, we buy product, we buy early, because if you buy later, you're paying multiples for revenue, which I don't believe in.”

“Today, if you look at the internet, we can all write on the internet. Distribution is no longer a limiting factor. Today, brand and content becomes important, right?”

“If companies have too much money, they get spoiled and they're not judicious and sometimes say, you know what, scarcity breeds the best outcomes because you're very judicious about how you spend your money.”

“If you look, I was talking to somebody the other day, you're always known by your last act. You know, it doesn't matter what you did before. If you screw something up, people say, oh, that guy, he just screwed this up. Maybe he was lucky earlier. This time he …”

“At Google, I was very stroppy with Eric when they bought Android. And I said, Eric, I used to work in the mobile industry. I thought he hired me for my experience. And we shouldn't be buying Android.”

“I think there's a big difference between CEOs and politicians. It's okay for us to, you know, when we make a decision, if some people are not happy, it's okay for us to make that decision, because hopefully time will prove that that was a good decision, or tim…”

“It would be wrong of any one of us to say that in the process of trying to get what we're trying to get done, we don't sacrifice other things while getting there. So yes. Will I sacrifice something on the family side? Sometimes for sure. Will I sacrifice spend…”

“I think there's still a bunch of experiments going on over there, and it'll take time before people get really comfortable. Unleashing agents in the enterprise.”

“We bought four D-plus companies in the last eight years”

“So, we declared the Sasacalypse for cybersecurity was over. We did not believe that we were going to get impacted, and you can see now that was six months ago, and we seem to be having a moment.”

“I'd never done cybersecurity in my life. This is a cybersecurity company. I've never been a public company CEO. This is a public company CEO job. And I'd never sold enterprise. I was a consumer guy.”

“If I can read what people have written over the last four years on LinkedIn, I can tell you who they are without having to ask them.”

“He's the oldest man I know with the risk appetite of a teenager. As he gets older, his risk appetite becomes bigger.”

“He's been the richest man in the world, and he's become poor. He's the richest man for eighty-some days. Then he went back being worth nothing.”

“The average time to patch a vulnerability, a zero-day vulnerability found in the wild is 55 days.”

“Now we found 14,000 vulnerabilities in open source in the last 14 weeks, testing open source packets.”

“I think more than half the enterprises are still not getting it right on the use of AI perspective.”

“We have a used judiciously model for tokens. It's not a free-for-all. Free-for-all sounds like you can go token max the hell out of it. We have to use it judiciously, and we keep track of it to see what people are doing. And if we find somebody who's using it …”

“Today, I want to say the cost of consumer goods is probably in the five to eight percent of total, you know, list price. The 92% is distribution and marketing.”

“I think this notion of guardrails has not been built robustly enough. These models seem to be easy to get past.”

“I don't want to build a lot of software that is proprietary to me for things that should be available for everyone. I don't want to build an AI marketing stack. I don't want to build an AI HR stack. I don't want to build an AI ERP stack.”

“I think the analytic world is getting reshaped already where you can see people like Snowflake or Glean or Databricks. All these people boast enterprise data lakes where you can bring the data and run LLMs against it and get you much more synthesized analytics…”

“I don't think physical AI will be as easy as having a generic frontier model because there's no consumer use case for physical AI, right? It's a depth use case only.”

“So in the world of bifurcation and horses or courses, I think open source is a good thing because it allows you to play the cost curve, right? You don't need the smartest model to the smartest thing. So open source is good.”

“And you get to a certain amount of money, then you decide there are some things I don't have to do anymore. I don't have to be a security guard. I don't have to flip burgers. Right. But that very quickly goes up for the thing. I don't have to tolerate certain …”

“The willingness to walk away makes sure you optimize the outcome. When you negotiate, if you're fully vested in the outcome, you fold at some point in time saying, well, I can't let Harry Stebbings walk away because Harry walks away, I have no deal.”

“We're prolific buyers of companies because I'm constantly paranoid that we have built it. Somebody else is going to build it. So we better go acquire it and find the team to go get it done.”

“We need to collect 10 times the data in the enterprise from a cyber perspective to be able to understand how to defend ourselves against the AI attackers.”

“I just think it increased the terminal value of the industry, right?”