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16 Things

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Re: 16 Things

#51

Post by dsacco »

tptacek wrote: post #28

Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped. Maybe it's true that firewalls ar…

Yep. Information security is a nonalgorithmic problem. Much as people might like to disagree or pretend otherwise, it is fundamentally at odds with a service that can scale to meet the needs of clientele in an automated manner. The most successful companies in that space are consultancies that can deliver personalized results to every client on every engagement, and while they are very successful, they will never be what venture capitalists want.

It feels good to try and form a business model on prevalent security themes like, "Think like an attacker" and "How do we develop preventative measures before we get hacked?" but that doesn't actually stop incidents from happening. There's no perfect security, just good enough security based on what a company can invest and how much risk it wants to manage.

This is something I've found most startup folks are really resistant to, because it means that they can't commercialize security services in the same way you can commercialize web hosting. That's understandably upsetting to them, when you see how trendy security has become in the media, and how successful a company could become by capitalizing on it.

I think the section any VC or investor has on security potential is going to remain naive for a long time. Semantic desires like "I don't want my mail to be read by other people" simply don't map very well to purely mathematical operations encapsulating privacy and security in software. Organizing security vulnerabilities into neat taxonomies makes security folks sleep well at night and gives the appearance of an ordered checklist you can build a product on, but in practice that's never the case.

Personally, I don't think security should be the sole product or service anyone tries to base a startup on. I am really excited about virtual reality and machine learning companies, however. I'd really love to see some hard innovations and improvements in that space. It'd be nice to have more hardware companies in general.

Re: 16 Things

#52

Post by larrys »

tptacek wrote: post #28

Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped. Maybe it's true that firewalls ar…

What bothers me are things like this which appear to be marketing messages aimed at CYA types or to simply lather up grandpa and the media:

"The threat of people getting into our systems today is so great that every company in the world has to embrace the notion that not only are they going to get hacked, there’s a good chance hackers are already inside … and they just don’t know it."

...and this:

"This set of companies comprise a very interesting category because everybody’s going to get hacked, so now it’s just a question of how quickly we respond when we see odd stuff going on within the company."

Specifically "everybody" and "every company". [1]

The idea that "everybody" is going to get "hacked" reminds me of the early days of the internet when newspapers were confused by what a "hit" to a website was. Not only would they print whatever you told them but they didn't recognize that serving up a graphic file which created a log entry wasn't significant in the way they thought it was. So we can just change the definition of "company" to suit our purpose and goal.

The fact is not even close to "everybody" is going to get hacked at least in a way that actually matters. Correct me if I am wrong (you would know the answer to this better) but are there even enough bodies to take advantage of all the targets assuming they had the skills and motivation to break into the targets and do something with the information?

[1] Is this the Valley's idea of saying that they can define things in a way that suits their purpose in other words only what they think is a company is a company?

Re: 16 Things

#53

Post by bbcbasic »

onewaystreet wrote: post #43
bbcbasic wrote: post #36

I don't know why these 16 things are more important than the other 16000 things start-ups could be working on. Bitcoin is the interesting one, as I would love to know in 10 years time if we look back at that with a wry smile as a fad, or if it ends up being something everyone uses.

> We don’t invest in themes; we invest in special founders with breakthrough ideas. Which means we don’t make investments based on a pre-existing thesis about a category. That said, here are a few of the things we’ve been observing or thinking about. The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting.

> The list is nothing more than some of the things they find interesting.

If that is true, I don't see the point of the article or that it warrants much discussion.

I don't think that is the intent of the article though.

I took it as they expect these 16 themes to yield a lot of the new ideas they will invest in. If that is the case then these 16 are quite arbitrary and I don't see why these were chosen.

Re: 16 Things

#54

Post by ironchef »

larrys wrote: post #52
tptacek wrote: post #28

Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped. Maybe it's true that firewalls ar…

What bothers me are things like this which appear to be marketing messages aimed at CYA types or to simply lather up grandpa and the media: "The threat of people getting into our systems today is so great that every company in the world has to embrace the notion that not only are they going to get hacked, there’s a good chance hackers are already inside … and they just don’t know it." ...and this: "This set of compan…

Couldn't the view simply be one of pragmatism? That one can't ONLY focus on prevention, but look at the full lifecycle of prevention, detection, response / remediation, etc.?

Kind of an electronic view of "it won't happen to me"?

Re: 16 Things

#55

Post by dsacco »

dxbydt wrote: post #38

I think putting Big Data & ML in one Bucket is a Big Mistake, pun intended. From where I am (DS at a sv startup), I see a few discrete Big Buckets - 1. Offline Big Data - This is mostly the ETL crowd - Scalding, Cascading, Spark & associated novel startups, who provide technology to run Map Reduce jobs on TBs & PBs of data. This isn't going away anytime soon. Investment Banks & enterprise, financial institutions are…

I agree. I don't care so much about grouping different disciplines of big data together, so much as putting it into the same category as machine learning.

The two definitely complement each other, but they are not the same.

Re: 16 Things

#56

Post by billconan »

blfr wrote: post #5

For instance, the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server. [1] What do they mean? How was that calculated? It sounds completely wrong. [1] http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client-computing/

I doubt that the trend is moving to the endpoints. I think it is moving towards the cloud.

Re: 16 Things

#57

Post by walterbell »

ironchef wrote: post #54
larrys wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me are things like this which appear to be marketing messages aimed at CYA types or to simply lather up grandpa and the media: "The threat of people getting into our systems today is so great that every company in the world has to embrace the notion that not only are they going to get hacked, there’s a good chance hackers are already inside … and they just don’t know it." ...and this: "This set of compan…

Couldn't the view simply be one of pragmatism? That one can't ONLY focus on prevention, but look at the full lifecycle of prevention, detection, response / remediation, etc.? Kind of an electronic view of "it won't happen to me"?

Assuming it's not everybody, are consumers/enterprises equipped with the risk management and actuarial tools to assess and influence their chances of being attacked?

Re: 16 Things

#58

Post by hamiltonkibbe »

tptacek wrote: post #28

Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped. Maybe it's true that firewalls ar…

P(burn|fighting-fire-with-fire) ≥ P(burn|fighting-something-else-with-fire).?

Re: 16 Things

#59

Post by TillE »

icpmacdo wrote: post #25
jfernandez wrote: post #4

In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from…

I have been working over ideas recently on how to solve the problem of people podcasting in different geographic locations. I think the big problem is latency and audio quality. The audio quality one seems like it is easily solvable with local recordings on both ends adjusted for said latency. The other thing I think would be cool is if with something like the oculus rift you could tune is and sit as the third person…

> with local recordings on both ends

This is what Jason Snell & co. do with The Incomparable. They also do a significant amount of editing to cut out people talking over each other, and make everything sound nice. The result is great, but it's a lot of manual effort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_2Y74p4UpU

Re: 16 Things

#60

Post by jimbokun »

jackschultz wrote: post #46
jfernandez wrote: post #4

In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from…

I see podcasts moving to a space where a person can consume in more than one way. Video, audio, and text. Depending on what you're doing at the time, you'd be able to 1) watch the hosts talk along with guests, relevant images and all that, basically a youtube show, 2) Just listen to the audio like "normal", or 3) read a transcription of the audio just as you would a blog post. Allowing a person to choose how they get…

"I see podcasts moving to a space where a person can consume in more than one way. Video, audio, and text."

I feel like a site like Grantland is pretty much there.

Of course, they do a much better job than just providing a transcript. Bill Simmons or Zack Lowe might write a long article about a topic, then discuss it on a podcast, then maybe extract some video clips and add some animation to spice it up.

The key, I think, is the creative people driving the process. Having the right instincts for what deserves a long form piece, a tweet, a blog length take, a podcast, or even a short documentary.

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