Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #27
Enterprise-Ready ROI, Programmable Defense and Ship Secure Code Faster
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!
As the field becomes more grounded and demands economic value, 2025 will see less “moonshot” internal AI projects and more widespread AI agent / vendor adoption – demonstrating ROI will be the gating item for implementation.1
As we kickoff (the always important) Q4, I notice a distinctive (and welcome) shift in conversations between early adopters and technical buyers - refocusing on use case, enterprise-ready value and ROI. For the last 18 months, early engagements were AI-forward and included a lot of educating, tire kicking and some tinkering.
Fast forward to Q4 2024, technology influencers/buyers are arriving at first meetings well-educated, their team members having already engaged with products and tools through easy to access trials. Founders are meeting this elevated conversation with enterprise-ready solutions, use case examples and actual ROI data.
In-production ROI examples are now available including Aomni removing friction to revenue (customer reported 100% improvement in sales reply rates!); Pixee’s lowering dev costs by 91% while enabling secure code; Dropzone’s freeing up SOC analyst cycles by autonomously investigating thousands of security alerts per month and Botpress has published 750,000+ AI Agents while supporting 35%+ of the Fortune 500 (in the last 12 months!). We have officially progressed beyond tinkering and pilots to enterprise production ready, ROI-delivering solutions.
The Watercooler: What we’re hearing in the Community
Decibel Community Events
Programmable Defense Summit, October 21 in NYC
We will be hosting our first “Programmable Defense” Summit later this month, a gathering of cybersecurity leaders who are using open and transparent security products to engineer a modern community-driven defense.
Security is becoming a more technical field that is following in the footsteps of modern software and cloud engineering. We now have several portfolio companies leading our industry forward and are excited to convene our early adopters in NYC. Please reach out to me (Stacey@Decibel.vc) if you would like to join the movement!
An Inside Look at Innovation - Pixee
Everyone wants to ship secure code faster and Pixee can help! Pixee is an innovative developer tool that automatically hardens and fixes code. Enterprise-proven, securing >20,000 repositories already, Pixee reduces remediation triage + development costs by an average of 91%! Think of it like having an expert product security engineer in the form of a GitHub bot. As engineers and/or AI-copilots do their thing and security scanners keep finding issues, Pixeebot will review the findings, identify what is real and provide high quality fixes instantly. While Pixee’s immediate goal is to alleviate the cognitive load caused by security needs, its vision extends to improving overall performance, consistency, and quality.
Pixee remediates vulnerabilities found by code scanners and triages findings to focus on critical issues, allowing developers to concentrate on feature development. Pixee’s developer assistant also hardens all new code prior to merge and performs weekly hardening of your existing codebase. Supporting Java, Python, Javascript, TypeScript, Node.js, and C#, Pixee is offered via private cloud and on-premises deployments to meet enterprise level security and compliance requirements. Give Pixee(bot) a spin (for free)!
Decibel Friends and Family Update
🎉 Congratulations…
Gus Shahin joins NetApp as EVP of Business Technology & Operations
Nate Yohannes now Head of GenAI for ad monetization at Meta
Nishant Doshi new Chief Product and Development Officer at Cyberhaven
Ruslan Kharitonov now Head of Compute Engineering at Citadel
Brian Cincera new CISO at Cargill
Alisha Lehr promoted to COO, Firmwide AI, at Morgan Stanley
Andrew Smeaton moves to CISO at JAMF
Gilbert Martin to Sr Director of Cloud Infrastructure at BlackLine
Andreas Wilkens now CTO of ibex
🎉 Dropzone AI named to the 2024 Intelligent Applications Top 40 (#IA40) list of the top private companies building with and enabling AI & GenAI that will shape our future.
🔥 e2b now powers all data analysis for Perplexity in production, and created >2M sandboxes for its customers in September.
🚀 Fortune recognizes runZero on its list of the Cyber 60, identifying the fastest-growing startups in cybersecurity!
🏆 Congrats to Andrew Reiskind, Chief Data Officer at Mastercard, and Jon Francis, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at General Motors, for being named to CDO Magazine’s 2024 list of Top 100 Data Leaders and Influencers!
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