YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Noon

lines on the record: 41
first: 2023-10-26
most recent: 2023-10-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“In the day, but like you're gonna have to maybe leave your house sort of, at least on Zoom, you know, and talk to people and find a market, you know. And I think with AI, you're seeing just the overabundance of shovel selling. Like the world needs next generation data dog for AI, but not that one because there's already that guy. This one's for testing, but not that kind of test, but mobile testing, that one, yeah, right. And it's like, stop. Like combinatores will never let you down. There's always going to be a way to cross these things. But like, how big is that actual market? How big is it?”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, like I'm not the only one with this pet peeve, but you see really talented technologists on founding teams. I really think it's like we're in the technology industry. Like, you know, if you leave the NBAs alone, they're going to do like Casper mattresses, but for mattress pads this time, but they come with razors on them and stuff. They're going to follow the same templates. God bless them. They need to exist. But the best companies have a technologist. Like, you know, maybe not in the CEO role, but like someone there. And technologists like we love to do what we know. And so there's this massive overabundance of engineering recruiting companies and DevOps, but this time totally different, dev tooling, like infrastructure monitoring, blah, blah. And it's like, dude, just like get out there and learn a market that's not your own, okay? Like it's just like the world needs your creative energy to paraphrase one of our slogans from Dropbox.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, like, just pick a good market, look for a lot of dollars and a lot of other shitty people that you can take those dollars from. The analogy that stuck for people was 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 eat mistakes, you know, you can burn time. play the game on easy if you possibly can you know yeah”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know people step like all the Warren Buffett quotes came back. I think Sequoia did like RIP Good Times like seven or whatever. And now it's gone again.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man. Yeah, I mean, there's just the basics figure out your team. Being a solo founder is actually totally okay. It's way better than being like, we had three coffees together and we just got married. Just start with the team. Everything is built on the team. Like it's the saddest thing in the world when you see a beautiful company and then like it's just the foundation has a crack in it and you have to tear the whole thing down, you know, make sure you have the same risk appetites and stuff like that. Just those basic, basic, basic stuff. Especially when, you know, we are irrationally exuberant again in Silicon Valley. We had a solid six months of being depressed because the end of free money.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a product that should exist. Everyone should just buy that. And then we have to x-ray it with like where distribution is going to come from. And like, you know, like, is this going to be easy to sell on a reasonable time scale and whatever? I think my favorite companies I'm spending the most time with tend to be in security. But if you want a grouchy yet somehow still optimistic guy on your cap table, just give me a call. But I'm looking to do less stuff in security.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extra make fun of all in cybersecurity. So I'm always just like, you know, like go in there and just if it's a thing that connects to an API that everybody uses and saves them all a bunch of time and makes it way easier, like just build that. Okay, like stop worrying about your Gartner category. You got like five years to even start paying Gartner, you know, like stop it. Well, you know how many people I've like sent your blog post of like what is a good market? Like, market is not the same thing as marketing.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man, I have this love hate things with security. Security, like what's annoying is because it's very mushy, no one necessarily knows what products are effective and whatever, whatever, you can kind of just really put your head down and grind and sell and build a beach head with your company. And so it might be a totally okay product. Like I was talking to a great founder yesterday and they're like thinking about what to build and whatever, whatever. And it's like 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 whatever Casby, UBA, SIM, whatever DNR, something, something, something like stop trying to look at this big, like you see these, like some of this, I'm security, you know, eyebars and stuff will put out these big quadrants of everything and how it all fits in. The thing that consumer people make fun of us enterprise people for are.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keep this shit secure that they're renting you, but no, you know, like, so that's been one of my biggest probably misses As an investor, not even independent of security. There's years of like, well, AWS will bundle this one, you know, and then no, they don't. I did diligence on Snowflake's B and told whoever asked me to pass because I'm like, Redshift exists. Like AWS is not asleep at the wheel. And then, you know, AWS subsequently told me when I talked to them about this, they're like, you know, we get paid either way. They don't under any CPUs. We can be lazy.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing so I think some of these problems I think have just gotten worse. I think there's always the infrastructure story of like the multi-decade mega trend of people getting rid of their data centers and allowing only a small handful of companies to buy all the semiconductors and then renting them from people. That centralization, you know, it's not like the most interesting thing for a lot of us, but you go to security conferences and it's, you know, I had to buy these seven things when I had a data center. Now I have to buy this one thing, but it comes with Amazon, but it sucks, but I have to buy this other thing. So that trend is not done. And there have been some great companies that have been built in that space in the last seven years that, you know, like I, you'd think that AWS and Google and Microsoft could”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super limited, what vendors can do, and the average employee, I think, understands that their company probably owns their work email account or whatever and has CARP launch to protect that and protect the company. But do you have your phone? Is it my phone? I brought it. I signed it in. Do I have MDM on it? All this stuff. And so that ends up being the situation where even Apple, who's like so good at locking it down to the extent that Zuck is super sad or whatever, like we'll lock down the device and prevent the most obvious forms of cybersecurity software being made. But then we'll sit on the problem for years while everyone gets run over. So people are usually, it's a sad thing in the tech industry that you probably see. People are better at keeping people out of their territory than using their territory. It's this very, very nasty sad.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. Honestly, I don't know how much has changed. It's like people still send emails, people still reply to text messages. I think there's always the, but Slack is going to have all those problems too or whatever, whatever. And I think at the end of the day, if something's a walled garden, like it will be involved in attacks, you know, someone will go in and own you because they compromise Slack after they compromise this and escalated whatever. But entirely new attack surfaces of ways to get to users from across the internet, broadly speaking, like I think have somewhat stable. What's the sad thing? I spend a lot of time thinking about mobile stuff. And it's sort of this tragic thing where I locked these things down hardcore now, right? It's actually like super.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, cybersecurity partnerships are super, super, super important because people hate to have to buy individual things in their cybersecurity stack, but they also hate when they buy a big bundle that sucks. So the right answer for the customer is to just for the vendors to be grown-ups and to work better together where possible”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you have typos, the LLM doesn't care. I've seen that from the public companies that totally still got it, you know, and then the science projects are just really good for OpenAI's revenue, I assume.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, obviously, Microsoft had this top-down mandate and had a year on everybody. And so they've been making a lot of noise and marketing it. And that's theoretically cool, but I don't know how I haven't used it personally yet. But you kind of, you probably saw this pattern, which is that kind of the growthy companies with the nerdy founders immediately started integrating this into the product, right? And then the youngish public companies that totally still got it, you know, would do like a thinner feature a little bit later, you know. And the big Fortune 500s are doing science projects, God bless them, you know. And so I think I'm saying that. And I've seen plenty of first bucket things that are very impressive. I've seen the, look, you can type in the box.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's just like serializing and deserializing data and parsing some old firewall thing from 20 years ago or whatever. And LLM can just eat that. Depending on volume and all that stuff. But a lot of spend, I think, is up for grabs as long as people have their expectations in the right place.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go harvest crops that are already growing and transplant them into their yard and water them with all these salespeople and all this bundling and all this market power. And so these paved roads, I think they're just a function of the extra technological and product uncertainty that is just compensated for that. That risk must be compensated for with extra low market risk. And so that's what you see. But Splunk buys things. The whole market just works this way. I think I wrote a blog post once where I called it the cybersecurity industrial complex. And it's their PE firms dressed up as innovators, blah, blah, blah. I was angry. I used to be very angry. But fundamentally, this happens. And so that means that we are kind of entrepreneurs at their worst. There can be new grades.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could buy an insurance policy, and there's a truism that all cybersecurity products are just complex insurance policies or whatever, right? But the point is that mushiness exists. And so what has resulted in the free market here is these incredible distribution machines, right? You have, you know, think like Cisco or Palo Alto Networks or even Microsoft and Google to an extent, right, where they just have the Salesforce, they have the bundle, they have the big conference with all the glitzy stuff or whatever, right? But they don't really know. If you ask the product manager at that company or whatever, and they're being honest, they don't know what bad guys are going to be doing in five years any better than anybody else does, right? And they don't know what's going to be effective. So why would they plant seeds from scratch when they could just”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean there's always room for startups. The cynical take here, or like the take I can give that is perhaps most informed and most cynical, whether this is whatever uninformed informed pessimism versus whatever is that basically, you know, in the cybersecurity industry, there's some basic economics, right? If you care about this, like there's a great paper that is actually required reading for everyone who's ever joined material, which I've never enforced, but it's called the Market for Silver Bullets, right? Like Ian Grigg wrote it. I think I sent it to you once. And it's like fundamentally, you know, there's markets for lemons and whatever, but there's markets for silver bullets, which is that fundamentally there's the buyer, there's the seller, and there's the attacker, you know, and so the buyer cannot really be sure of the effectiveness of what they're buying and whatever, whatever. And so you can't really look at a solution and be sure that it will save you, right?”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shovel selling is overhyped, but I think the thoughtful discourse on what our society will be like in 10 years is probably underhyped.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The New York Times or whatever has said about ChatGPT or whatever experience you had the first time you used it six months ago when you were on the free version is how you see everything. And so they'll be like, we need to make sure it doesn't make stuff up. We need to have it generate. It's all kind of like order zero stuff. I think people have yet to realize that like the computer can think in like a much more salient way than it ever could before. And so I think people are still playing catch up.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, they do a fantastic job in a lot of levels. Obviously, we were all had to, the valley had to deal with Snowden and everything 10 years ago and whatever. And I don't need to take a side on that one. But the point is we have some pretty incredible people doing offensive stuff as well in cybersecurity. And deterrence works pretty well a lot of the time as well. So when it comes to LLM specifically, I think everyone is still figuring out what the hell is even going on. You know, like it's going to take them a while. I think you see DARPA doing really interesting stuff. There are interesting projects out there. But I think, and this is maybe a motif that I see broadly with LLMs is like, you know, unless you go super, super deep on this stuff, you kind of see everything through the lens of like the popular discourse of chat GPT. Like whatever, you know, the”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in this space, you are kind of on your own as an American. It's like if I was in the military protects Americans and guards our borders, what does that even mean, you know, with like cyberspace? I hope you hire a CISO, you know,”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, you could literally, you know, if you're like North Korea, you're going to say, You're all going to use this Linux distribution. But it doesn't support whatever I want. I'm sorry. We're an authoritarian state. Like, oh, well, what if I get fished? Sorry. Like, that's not how bank accounts work in our country. It's just like you can control information. You can't, this usually gets viewed through the lens of social media disinformation. If you can regulate and lock down the entire social media discourse, then what election is going to get hacked and where would it get hacked? But the same thing, I think, holds true for all of cybersecurity. The other interesting, you know, like way of looking at this that's always kind of baffled me is that, you know, if cyberspace is a space, right, like in US military terminology, it is a command, just like North Africa is a command, like cyberspace is a command. Like William Gibson, you know, would be present.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you have a lot of intelligence that is extremely online, like you have a ton of power, and the West, I think, is especially vulnerable to this, like open societies, I think, are extra vulnerable when it comes to Infosec stuff because we put it all out there. We adopt these systems. We open them up. We let the private sector totally handle them. We are early adopters of every digital technology and we are very happy to waive our soft underbelly on the internet as a society. We don't lock it down.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So whenever innovation happens, the entire world will adopt it before they realize, oops, it messes up democracy or like, oops, whatever, you know, like utility drives adoption, not safety, like welcome to earth, you know. And so I think on the nation state side, you don't have to even be hyperbolic with like, you know, it's the atom, it's the whatever. It's because fundamentally like intelligence is now a commodity that we can arms race. Weird, you know, it's not, you know, like atomic power can arms race like no, like intelligence itself can now go red queen.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, you have to invest in cybersecurity. My moral basis for cybersecurity existing is that it is essentially like the waste heat of all other innovation 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 the utility of that will drive adoption and then cleaning up after it for whatever the side effects of that are is what essentially cybersecurity does, right? And so we are the cleanup crew for all other innovation, which is a living. It's an honest living.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We used to wine that we only had 140 characters and not flying cars, technology does give you step functions every once in a while. And this is just that. So it doesn't mean that we're all doomed now. And I think getting a sense of the scope of the threat is really hard in cybersecurity because you could be like, you know, hey, we're a Fortune 500 and we left the front door open for a year and no one walked in it. Like hackers are fake. Cybersecurity industry is BS, right? Or you can be some little no-name company and just get run over and you're like, the barbarians are at the gate. And it's like really hard to know exactly what you're up against, right? But what's interesting is that automation, like it's like one human can now supervise a thousand humans. You don't need a room full of jerks trying to hack grandma or whatever when honestly like one jerk.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we all kind of wonder about this. I was talking to somebody from the White House who was trying to figure out how to talk about security and LLMs a little bit. I think the operative analogy that ended up helping was Bronze Age versus Iron Age kind of thing. And that if you're, you know, if you're a tribe or something and you have bronze weapons and your neighbor next door gets iron weapons, then you're going to have a bad time. You're going to need to go and get iron weapons. And so all of this talk about airstrike the data centers and prevent it from being aligned or not aligned or whatever the current term is. Like that's like saying, you know, well, this super high grade carbon steel from space needs to be restricted. But honestly, like if someone's got iron weapons against your bronze armor, like good night, you know, and so these LM things, it's a step function. Like, you know, forever often.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doesn't even have to be that hard. Like, as in the standard new employee joins company receives text message claiming to be CEO thing, it works at scale, you know. So like, and it's the sheer amount of like, you know, you go, you go see these attacks at random bad guys are sending to people and like they're not even like using grammar properly. Like 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”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it can be a human. And I'm just talking about the text models, right? Like, so much of cybersecurity is just text. And there's nasty hacks that are reported where someone's voice was fake very convincingly and they made a phone call and blah, blah, blah, like humans trust humans through computers. That was, I think, the key mistake we made.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the best thing about the security industry is that there's also the security cottage industry of like it's not the fancy security vendor who's buying the CISO steak and having them drive Ferraris around Vegas every August. It's just a strong security engineer who's just hacking something together. And so some of the best companies that I've seen are just that. And so you're seeing all these like, there are cool projects out there. I don't want to name drop too many of my friends on this podcast, but like, you know, just like the stuff that Socket's doing, just like analyzing NPM dependencies, like, you know, even just like stack analysis, like looking for like, you know, hey, you dropped sense of information in the middle of your code base. That's like such a messy, hard problem as any computer science person can tell you. And like, these things are pretty good at reading code.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's obviously the offensive side is what you're not supposed to talk about too much, but obviously the bad guys were talking about it. And security, it does have this arms racy sort of aspect to it. So we need security LM companies because the bad guys exist. Honestly, the order zero thing when I keep meeting with founders, you hear this, there's all these kind of classic clich ⁇ s in the cybersecurity industry. The cybersecurity skills shortage, like America needs 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? Okay, start there, you know. And so there's just basic things like that, but it gets more interesting, I think, from there. But let's go to Disney World collectively after we do that, and then we'll come back.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, I've seen a lot of startups starting from scratch here and whatever. And as an engineer, I know when I have headroom, and honestly even in GPT three and a half, there was plenty to work with. I'm seeing a lot of shovel selling, obviously, right now, in the AI market. And I'm seeing a lot of like, you know, I need to pretend that I have a moat. So I need to, you know, fine-tune all this stuff and whatever, whatever. But yeah, no, I mean so many things that were very, very, very hard for computers 18 months ago are very, very easy for off-the-shelf models. So I think maybe chew your food first security industry.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, it was like Shangsung from Mortal Kombat. It has eaten the souls of thousands of security engineers. And so you might as well use it because honestly, there's a lot of just raw operational work that happens in security of just like we need to 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. And it turns out LMs are fantastic at that. And so that was the first use case that we really kind of productionized. But beyond that, it's kind of gone crazy. So there's a lot of engineering. You have to do that.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second you give a coder a replay, we will start iterating basically, right? And chat GPT, if nothing was not the world's greatest REPL. So, I mean, we just started playing with it, and then we're like, there's a lot of security domain knowledge baked into this thing. It turns out if you feed precisely one internet to precisely a million GPUs, it picks up a thing or two about cybersecurity. And so, you know, it's the kind of thing that obviously like the bad guys are starting to figure out in earnest. And it's not like you can prevent this stuff from getting democratized. But we just, you could do simple things. You could feed it a bunch of raw email headers. Anyone who's coded with these things, it's like this weird wetware grafted into the middle of a computer. It's like it's squishy and sarcastic and parody, you know, but you have to integration test and model around it. I think the analogy I used.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it matters, but we used to call the company like seatbelts for email or whatever back in the day. It sucks to crash your car. It really sucks to go through the windshield. Google and Microsoft have a total duopoly on all of this. And kind of whatever little thing that they missed from a security perspective is world altering. I mean, there's a headline every couple months. every cabinet secretary just got their email hacked because all of the eggs were in Microsoft's basket, you know, and so we kind of just exist to fill the gaps in whatever doors they leave open. That's, you know, it's very fragile having a duopoly are stable in the market, but very fragile when it comes to security.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, what do they want? They got over the wall. There should be another wall and a machine gun. It's like history has all these fairly basic lessons about resiliency that never really always get applied the right way when it comes to computers.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sensitive stuff that's just sitting around just sitting in your inbox, your archive, whatever. And then it can basically redact it and then replace it with a clean copy so that if somebody gets in and downloads the whole thing, they don't get anything good. But then if you happen to need it, I like having all this information at my fingertips. You can just press a button and an extra face ID or a touch ID or more advanced policies and work, but just something that's easy for you but hard for the attacker. So we started there and then we expanded into anti-phishing. Which is more of the things that people do after they compromise the account and I try to reset all your other accounts and steal your bank account and all of that. The operative concept is defense in depth, which is just assume that the bad guy got in.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the broad thesis is basically we've all kind of got these Google and Microsoft accounts. Email is sort of where we started, but since then we've kind of just went deeper and deeper and deeper into sort of everything that you can use a Gmail account or a Microsoft account for. The bread and butter of the business is selling to companies midsize and up with these kind of these big Google workspace and Office 365 deployments. The product has a bunch of different modules that are all kind of based around the main things people worry about, the kind of the first big product that you mentioned in the intro was people have years and years of sensitive information sitting in these accounts. If somebody gets into your Google account, they're just going to download all of your email and go through it later and your whole life is in there. It's even worse in a corporate environment. And so that product, what it can do actually is find.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. So we started material, I guess, 2016, 2017 or so. I'd left Dropbox and was living in Europe and fell in love with all the election hacking that happened year that year was pretty nasty. Every random Gmail account kept getting dumped on the internet. So I had an idea for how to protect a Gmail account. ordinary personal one in like a fairly novel way. I coded it. It shockingly worked, the Gmail API let you do it. I brought it back home and showed it to some friends. And we realized this is actually a special case of a broader way of thinking. Now, seven years later, it's whatever cybersecurity unicorn thing, and we get to work with the coolest companies in the world by far and the stuff that you get to do at the scale is just mind-blowing. It's wild to think just where it started and where it's come.”
2023-10-26 · No Priors · AI Threats & Opportunities in Cyber Security With Material Security Co-Founder Ryan Noon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT