Originally published on my newsletter on 2/14. I start working at JMI Equity on Friday and we’ve decided to hold off on publishing the newsletter for a few weeks to give us time to figure out the best way to make it work in a fund that’s subject to various regulations with regards to its marketing practices. Thus, for the 51st issue, I wanted to recap the 38 interviews that I was lucky enough to hold over the past 50 weeks. I also wanted to note that after running last week’s interview, Hexadite CEO Eran Barak sent me some revised … Continue reading A Year in Interviews and a Break: Nick’s Newsletter No. 51

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. This week I spoke to Eran Barak, the cofounder and CEO of Hexadite. Hexadite, like Resilient Systems (see my interview with cofounder and CEO John Bruce) operates in the emerging incident response market. Hexadite’s unique selling point is its automation; since the product performs many of the time intensive tasks involved in responding to incidents, such as collecting and analyzing data, companies can respond to incidents more quickly and with fewer analysts. Hexadite is used by such companies as telecom and payments provider IDT, whose CSO talked about … Continue reading Hexadite Cofounder and CEO Eran Barak: Nick’s Newsletter No. 50

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. This week I got the chance to speak to Jim Routh, the CSO of Aetna and one of the most experienced information security professionals in the game right now. Prior to being named Aetna’s CSO, Jim served as Aetna’s CISO for several years, served as head of application, mobile and internet security at JP Morgan Chase (pre-breach), and was the CISO of KPMG. Jim also serves as Chairman of the National Health ISAC and a Board Member of the FS-ISAC. Jim is a frequent speaker at RSA and … Continue reading Aetna CSO Jim Routh: Nick’s Newsletter No. 49

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. This week I talked to Lou Manousos of RiskIQ. RiskIQ is unique in that they protect companies from threats that exist outside their corporate networks. This type of protection is becoming increasingly necessary as the amount of potential attack vectors outside of corporate networks continues to grow exponentially–think social media and mobile. In the interview below, Lou and I discuss how he convinces corporations to buy his product, RiskIQ’s recent acquisition of PassiveTotal, and how he chose to raise money from Battery and Summit. I’ve read that … Continue reading RiskIQ Cofounder and CEO Lou Manousos: Nick’s Newsletter No. 48

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. This week I spoke to Paul Kurtz, the cofounder and CEO of TruSTAR Technology. Paul was previously the CISO of CyberPoint and worked at the National Security Council earlier in his career. Threat sharing has become a hot topic of discussion in the security world and threat information sharing platforms such as TruSTAR have arrived to meet the demand. In the space of just a month, TruSTAR and threat sharing platforms ThreatConnect and ThreatQuotient all raised funding. TruSTAR allows companies to share threat information in a truly anonymous … Continue reading TruSTAR Cofounder and CEO, Paul Kurtz: Nick’s Newsletter No. 47

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. This week I got the chance to speak to John Bruce, the Cofounder and CEO ofResilient Systems. John has argued that there are an abundance of security companies that provide detection and prevention capabilities, but very few that tackle the crucial task of responding to incidents once they occur. Now that companies must assume that they have already been breached and that they will be breached in the future, response capabilities are essential for a strong security program. John and I discuss the primitive methods that some … Continue reading Resilient Systems Cofounder and CEO John Bruce: Nick’s Newsletter No. 46

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. I hope everyone had a happy New Year! Since it’s a pretty slow news week, I wanted to take the time today to highlight some of the interesting facts that I learned from the people that I interviewed this year. Note that I could’ve written 100 interesting facts because I learned so much from all of my interviewees and it wasn’t easy narrowing it down to 10. Dmitri Alperovitch, CTO and Cofounder of Crowdstrike described the benefits of having a cloud-hosted security platform, arguing that the cloud … Continue reading 10 Things I learned from Interviewees in 2015: Nick’s Newsletter No. 45

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. I love speaking to entrepreneurs each week because the vision and excitement that they have for their companies and products is infectious. All the excitement in the world however, does them no good if nobody wants to buy that product. This week I had the amazing opportunity to speak to the person ultimately responsible for making a lot of those purchase decisions for his organization: Lockheed Martin CISO Jim Connelly. In the interview below, Jim and I discuss how Lockheed thinks about protecting itself against sophisticated adversaries, … Continue reading Lockheed Martin CISO Jim Connelly: Nick’s Newsletter No. 44

Sign up for my newsletter to see more interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. There are a lot of interesting things happening in endpoint security nowadays and I’ve been fascinated with the progression of the space. Antivirus products were created 30 or so years ago, and up until a few years ago, there had been little innovation in endpoint security. In the past few years however, there’s been a flood of activity and money is following the innovation. Earlier this year, Ianalyzed the venture capital flowing into cybersecurity and found that in 2015 (as of mid-August), endpoint security companies had received significantly more … Continue reading SentinelOne Cofounder and CEO, Tomer Weingarten: Nick’s Newsletter No. 43

Sign up for my newsletter to see interviews with the biggest names in cybersecurity. The News: ZeroFox: What Our B-Round Means for the Growth of Social Media Security ZeroFox claims that social media represents the largest unsecured network in the world and points out that Cisco’s mid-year report claims that Facebook scams are now the #1 way to breach corporate networks. This Va. Cybersecurity Startup Is So Hot Right Now More news on PhishMe. The company had $10.2 million in 2014 revenue and has brought in $25 million in billings thus far in 2015. Inc. 5000 also rated them the second-fastest growing security … Continue reading Nick’s Newsletter No. 42