Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #26
Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #26
Programmable Defense, Sovereign AI and SaaS Ecosystem Security
Welcome to Community-Led. Each week we connect founders to dozens of early adopters and technology executives in fast growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. This newsletter surfaces the most interesting insights and conversations across the >2,000 members of the Decibel early adopter community every month. Let’s dive in!
Hosting 600+ Decibel friends and family at Black Hat last month led to many compelling conversations that only reinforced our belief that the future of security (specifically security engineering) is empowering this already strong and tight knit security community with solutions that reduce vendor bottlenecks, enable customization and provide leverageable knowledge at scale and speed. We call this The Programmable Defense and many early adopters in our security community are already benefiting from adopting this next gen technology (and joining the movement!).
As my partner Dan outlines, bad actors continue to upgrade their arsenal with a broader range and variety of AI-based attacks, security engineers will need new tools to counter these threats effectively. While there has never been a lack of knowledge as security practitioners have long congregated in digital forums like Slack channels, Twitter, and HackerNews, sharing insights and strategies, and implementing them uniformly, has always been a challenge. Mike Schwartz, former Cybersecurity leader at AWS and Target and now head of research and threat analysis at Censys, adds, “the implementation of this shared knowledge often hits a wall at the product level because everyone has different vendor tooling and thereby can’t be implemented in a prescribed way”.
Reducing vendor bottlenecks (moving away from black box and towards transparency), the power of community (applying knowledge at a scale and speed/efficiency that no one vendor can compete with) and customization (instead of one size fits all) are all characteristics of this emerging security engineering approach. Companies pioneering this important movement include Sublime Security, SpecterOps, Panther, Prowler, Push Security, and they are now delivering on the vision by empowering the security engineering community to compete with ever-evolving threats - check them out!
The Watercooler: What we’re hearing in the Community
Decibel Community Events
Sovereign AI Summit in Singapore
My first time back to Singapore in ~10 years and it was great to see old friends and make new ones! Hosting our first Sovereign AI Summit in Singapore, we were excited to meet with thought leaders from enterprise tech, major cloud providers, and government in the region. Of course, re-connecting with the local innovators and early adopters at Razer Inc., Grab and Singtel were all highlights for me and our team!
Singapore is an innovative thought leader and we look forward to continuing to deepen our engagement and partner with this vibrant ecosystem to support early stage innovation. To that end, we are coming back for SWITCH in October and starting to make plans now - reach out if you will be in Singapore the week of Oct 28th… 🔥
The Decibel Oasis at Black Hat in Las Vegas
Thanks to the >600 friends in the Decibel family who attended our Black Hat panels, meetups, competitions, and cocktail events throughout the week...always great to get the community together! 🚀
Black Hat 2024 highlights and congratulations...
✨to Kenneth Yeung, the winner of our Man vs Machine competition sponsored by Dreadnode and SpecterOps, this open challenge gave over 100 security researchers the opportunity to test their skills by hacking AI models in real-world simulations.
✨to Caleb Sima and Nir Polak on the launch of their new security incubator, White Rabbit!
✨to HD Moore, Edward Wu, Josh Kamdjou and Damien Lewke for being the last founders standing in the Decibel Partners meeting suite!
Upcoming Decibel Community events
Credo’s Responsible AI, Oct 2-3 in San Francisco
Join the conversation as Credo AI hosts the third edition of its Responsible AI Leadership Summit, where AI innovators and governance pioneers will lead conversations around building trustworthy AI and developing responsible AI governance. Confirmed executives attending include AI and Governance leaders from AWS, Bloomberg, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco, Cohere, Mastercard, Northrop Grummon, and Pepsico. RSVP here!
Decibel’s AI Pioneers Summit. Oct 16 in San Francisco
We are excited to again partner with Latent Space and host the AI Pioneers Summit which brings together over 200 product and engineering leaders that are building with AI today.
We will be welcoming a select group of pioneers ranging from startup founders building at the cutting edge of the technology to tech leaders deploying this technology in Fortune 500 production environments. Contact Stacey@Decibel.vc for more information!
An Inside Look at Innovation - Push Security
“Push does for identity what Crowdstrike did for the endpoint”, Geoff Belknap, Deputy CISO at Microsoft, Former LinkedIn, Slack, Palantir
Push Security stops identity attacks and secures the new perimeter by turning every employee's browser into a telemetry source and control point for defending workforce identities. We are excited to see that Push Security has been included organically as one of the key vendors in the latest Gartner Emerging Tech report for SaaS Ecosystem security. It’s a very positive sign for the security industry that SaaS/identity is now being formally recognized as a critical part of a modern company’s attack surface.
To raise awareness of SaaS attacks and provide information and resources to security leaders, Push Security launched the SaaS attack matrix, a free-to-all GitHub repo of attack techniques. This report highlights the need for SaaS Governance and Security, and covers critical topics, such as:
Laying the groundwork for understanding the SaaS landscape
Understanding SaaS Attack Paths
Chaining attacks together and the complex factors at play from shadow usage, identity-oriented attacks, and attack chaining
SaaS Security should be a focus for all modern security practitioners. Check out Push Security as they recognize the power of enabling the security community with the knowledge to work together on these critical problems.
Decibel Friends and Family Update
🎉 Congratulations…
Eric Latalladi named Global Head of Technology at WTW
Norman Hunt moves to Tower Insurance as CISO
Mona Breed new CIO at Toast
Joe McManus joins Grafana Labs as CISO
Susan Chiang new CISO at Headway
Meagen Eisenberg announced as new CMO at Samsara
Howie Xu to Chief AI & Innovation Officer at Gen
Pallaw Sharma takes the helm as CEO at Accellor
Todd Holloway named White House Presidential Innovation Fellow
Howard Wright joins Nvidia as head of Startups Ecosystem
🔥 Derek Idemoto, Cisco’s Head of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, recognized as one of the top 100 leaders in the 2024 Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist.
🏆 Brian Tilzer, Chief Digital Analytics and Technology officer, and his team at Best Buy for being recognized by Forrester Research as a Technology Strategy Impact Award winner!
🚀 Brightwave named a "Top Emerging Fintech Company" finalist for the 2024 Finovate Awards!
See you next time.
Thanks for reading. This is a community that you’re always welcome to contribute to. If you have any feedback or know a story that’s perfect for this newsletter, please reach out. Email me at Stacey@Decibel.vc.
Stacey