The Wisdom Wall
12 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“there's a, you know, like a truism that all cybersecurity products are just, you know, complex insurance policies or whatever, right? But the, the, the point is like that, that mushiness exists. And so what has resulted in, in, in the free market here is these incredible distribution machines, right? You have, you…”
“a lot of the best VCs like never, you know, make bets in cybersecurity because, you know, at best you're going to get a two hundred million dollar takeout to Paladin networks or whatever, right? That's the typical outcome”
“Kind of classic cliches in the cybersecurity industry, like the cybersecurity skills shortage, like America needs, you know, to bring back the draft and make everyone get a security certificate or something. Okay. Like, you know, that you have like, 90% of a human that you can use for like a penny and a half, right?…”
“Take a step back and just, like, try and build an incredibly useful thing that everyone should buy. Stop thinking about the Gartner categories and, you know, whatever, CASB, UBA, SIM, whatever, DNR, something, something, something, like, stop, like, trying to, like, look at, at this, like, big, like, and you see these,…”
“Duopolies are stable in the market, but, but very fragile when it comes to security.”
“there's a lot of just raw operational work that happens in security of just like, we need to, you know, rarefy this signal, filter out the noise, and then honestly feed it through a human being who has some experience as to what the bad guys are trying to do. Uh, and you know, it turns out LLMs are fantastic at that.”
“Like, if all they could do was, like, spell check the bad guys, and that's all you were using, like, whatever off the shelf, you know, open source LLM for, like, even that would make a difference materially on, you know, cybersecurity policy returns.”
“Like one human can now supervise a thousand humans. You know, you don't need a room full of like jerks trying to hack grandma or whatever, uh, when honestly like one jerk will now suffice, you know, with a for loop.”
“my, my moral basis for cybersecurity existing is that is essentially like the, the waste heat of all other innovation in, in computing and information, which is like, you know, if a computer is doing something new for you that it wasn't doing last year, then like the utility of that will drive adoption. And then like…”
“So much of security is, uh, is, is emitting Logs and alerts and then parsing those logs alerts again and aggregating them. You know, I, I spent a lot of time doing, you know, data infrastructure and analytics in my life, you know, before, after my cybersecurity grad degree, but before I started using that degree, uh,…”
“kind of the, the growthy companies with the nerdy founders, like immediately started integrating this into the product. Right. Uh, and then the like youngish public companies that like totally still got it. You know, would do like a thinner feature a little bit later, you know, the big fortune 500 are doing science…”
“the difficulty level of the game that is starting a company is essentially just, like, the size of the market, like, the inverse of that. You know, like, the bigger the market, like, you can, you can eat mistakes, you know, you can, you can burn time, you know, like, it's just play, play the game on easy if you…”