Techstrong Gang – April 30, 2025

Hey, everyone, tech Strong and AI are taking over. RSAC. You're watching Techstrong Gang.

Hello, everyone. If you can't tell, we're not in our usual book of its own studio. We're here it at the Moscone Center West on broadcast Alley, bringing you Textron Gang from RSA conference.

Um, happy to be joined by two of our regular gang members. Our West Coast people are finally here in person with us coming down from the Golden Gate Bridge, atop church. Hi, talk, the Golden Gate Bridge.

Always Our sar, the SAR of Silicon Valley, John Schwartz. John, it's great to have you. Welcome To San Francisco, uh, where Lisa and I live.

Um, not together, but we lived in the Bay Area. Sorry about that. Uh, a lot of history in this Moscone Center.

I was gonna tell, I used to work on this street for five years. I worked at a place called Mac Week. Mm-hmm.

And, uh, there are a lot of history. There's, there's the iPhone announcements here with Steve Jobs in 2007. We had the Democratic National Convention in 1984 with the famous Mario Cuomo speech.

Originally, that facility was supposed to be a hockey arena. Really, the idea was to build, uh, an arena for the basketball and hockey professional teams by a guy named Mill Swig. It never happened.

And instead, they built Moscone Center with, I don't wanna say mixed, mixed results. It's a very interesting, somewhat flawed facility, but it's also a lot steeped in history. Yeah.

Yes, it is. Yeah, I remember that Cuomo speaks That was in response to the city on the hill. Exactly.

It was his rejoinder to Ronald Reagan. Yeah, it was Brilliant, interesting times. Of course, Lisa, you're much too young to remember that a little bit.

But, um, joining us also part of our San Francisco West Coast Silicon Valley gang members, and she's here all week doing interviews with us. Lisa Martin. Hey, Lisa.

How are you? It's great to be with you guys in person. Yes.

You don't get it. We don't get a chance to get you person. We don't in person much.

Don't. We don't. You guys are both taller than you are in stream yard.

Probably a little I would imagine. I don't think I am. Well now you look pretty tall.

Anyway, um, so guys, look, it's a gangbusters. RSA, we did our DevSecOps event yesterday. Amazing day.

We had some amazing leaders speaking. It was great. If you can't tell, I have a cold and my voice isn't what it usually is, but we're gonna power through this.

Um, AI seems to rule the day here. No, no different than when we're back in the studio. Right.

Uh, our first story, I, I guess, comes out of a story that you and Mike covered. Well, Mike covered it, uh, but we both were briefed on it by Cisco. Cisco, basically, I'm gonna do a little cheat, cheat notes here for a second.

But, uh, Mike wrote the story. It's in Security Boulevard. Uh, Cisco is making available an open source gen AI reasoning model, uh, to automate cybersecurity analytics and workflows.

They also announced a set of controls for securing AI artifacts and software supply chains. So that, that was their, their news. Um, it's interesting, um, they're also further integrating the Splunk platform for analyzing it telemetry data That's, that had acquired last year with the Yeah.

XDR. So it, it's, it's funny because at the same time, these, this news is being announced, I'm getting flooded with data surveys, polling, that's showing this incredible two things. Fomo and the urgency from the top.

Yeah. To get up to speed as fast as humanly possible, which is contradicted by this almost paralytic fear or terror of, of screwing it up. Yeah.

And so there are a lot of polling results. S NCC just came out with one today. Um, basically showing 80% of the IT managers within these companies are convinced something is, is gonna happen.

And they're, they're really concerned about it, but they're, they're, they're kind of wading their way into it. So what I think, in a sense, what Cisco's trying to do, and we're gonna talk about the Palo Alto Networks and others are trying to do, is assuage their customers and, and ensure them that they're not rushing headlong into a oblivion or some sort of security disaster. Yeah.

I mean, I hope They are rushing. They are. It's everybody Is this massive corporation.

Go, you know what, this, this so much reminds me of 2006. Mm-hmm. And 2006 had a lot of friends starting companies that were looking for funding.

And the first question every VC asked, or the first question every journalist asked when they met with a new company is, what's your cloud? What's your cloud story? Mm-hmm.

What's your cloud story? Mm-hmm. Right?

What, how do you play in the cloud? What are you doing with the cloud? Now, this might be that on steroids.

I think it is. Right? What's your AI story?

Palo Alto. You're one of the biggest, well, interestingly, Palo Alto is not on that show floor, or they don't have a big Well, they're gonna have, So later today I'm gonna go over to their press event. They blocked out like two and a half hours, which is an ungodly amount of time for a press event.

But they're gonna announce an AI security platform, which we'll talk about in Block B. They're gonna talk about an acquisition. They're gonna do a lot of things, things.

But they, they chose, I don't know why, but their executives will be at this event. They're gonna have it at the Metreon, which Is No, I will tell you why. They Tell me why They didn't wanna spend the money to do a big RSA event.

A lot of the bigger companies I've seen this, it started with my friend Philippe Cortell at Qualys about 10 years ago. Of course, Philippe passed away. He's not with us anymore, unfortunately.

But Qualys, uh, gave up their booth space here. Interesting. And instead used to hold court at either the St.

Regis or another hotel on Union Square, a lot of the bigger companies to get the kind of presence that they want. It's prohibitive to do it on the show floor here, which is you just Get lost in the shelf Rows. Yeah.

So they, they move their stuff off, off prep, Uh, Microsoft and GI GitHub, I believe are gonna have a, some event down at the Palace. Yeah. Well, Microsoft has a huge floor.

So they have, they have a booth. The floor. Okay.

What you'll also see, I don't know if we could see it, but if you look out here, what used to be Jillian's Yes. Uh, is the CrowdStrike, Falcon Rooster, whatever. Yeah.

Next to it is another one over here. Uh, I forgot the name. All of these, they've taken over every space around.

So this is kind of weird. So South by Southwest did the same thing. Yes.

Right. There's the big convention center. But I remember even 10 years ago, they, they would, they would rent out, when I was at USA today, we rented out a restaurant and we had just our customers come there and the reporters would report from there.

Um, red Herring would do this traditionally at South by Southwest there, CNN had their bar and grill. Yep. And I think an phenomenon is happening where you kind of capture the brand as you Popups.

Popups. Yes. Yes.

And, and it's huge when They get, they get away from the noise. Yeah. There's so much noise.

Well, trying to just have their own noise. Yeah. Quiet.

But you bring up a quiet point. Quiet noise. Yesterday I talked with, um, a lot of great security companies.

And there, you bring up a great point about this, this paralytic fear, but also the acceleration that there's fomo. We have to get on board here. We have to have an AI story.

But AI is making the cyber landscape even more amorphous. Yeah. And, and hard to control.

But we had a lot of great conversations yesterday about how these contrast security, intro security was on, and internet was here talking about secure, uh, storage. 90% of your enterprise data is in your storage solution. So you need to be able to secure that rather than having all the doors open.

But folks are definitely in that, in that urgency mode. Fear of missing out, but also concern of what risks does this AI opportunity also present? So maybe this is the conference that, that tries to temper the fears and the anxiety of, of the Enterprises.

Oh, no, that's not security. No. You think it's Just gonna rage.

We, we live on fud. What? Are you kidding?

Yeah. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. They're going to, they're Gonna, they're gonna tell 'em everything that can go wrong. Right.

They're gonna raise it to a level. Um, I, I think what it is though is every company wants to be perceived as being aware of the risk on top of trying to manage it and harnessing the power of AI to make their solutions better for in this day and age. And when you get a company like Cisco that's talking about releasing open source pigs fly, right?

Mm-hmm. Cisco's releasing open source software because they're afraid, and this is my personal opinion, I don't know for sure. They're afraid they don't have the mojo to do this AI thing themselves.

Really. And by putting it out in the open source community, they're looking to gather allies ah, and support to get this thing ready for prime time. Yeah.

Do you think they, would they represent a number of other companies, probably like their size or their tradition or their, their reputation who are gonna do the same thing. They're gonna call the same type of Strategy. Well, I, here, here's the deal.

I gotta get an AI solution out there. My, my shareholders, the press, everyone's clamoring. Right?

What's your AI story? What's your AI story? How can I get an AI solution out to market fast the fastest?

Yes. Open source it Right. Crowdsource it.

Get the community other con, especially in this era of foundational open source where we could do coopetition. Yes. You know, I think when I think about, uh, Cisco's a classic example of a company that probably needs to do that.

Because in a sense, they've gone through layoffs. They've kind of been, they, they're all long and established, venerable. It's hard for them to pivot.

They're too big. They don't Innovate. Yes.

They, it's hard to innovate. I mean, I won't go down a path with Apple. That's another story.

But Ortel. But I think it's the same type of situation where, you know, Microsoft got ahead of the curve, um, Yeah. With open ai.

With open ai. So these companies, in a sense, are, they're adapting at their own speed. And their speed sometimes is a little bit slower than others because they're bigger.

Yeah. Well, but no, but this, this is the, the way of the world grass upper right. In security, there's little fish, medium fish and big fish.

Little fish innovate. Yeah. Medium fish.

Eat the big fish and kind of innovate from that big fish. Eat the medium fish. And That's, and they don't innovate usually.

No. They just, you know, they Just acquire Acquihire. Exactly.

That's what, um, ServiceNow has done a lot of that. They, I can't even, I can't keep track of the number of acquisitions they've done. Yeah, I know.

Um, Cisco is tradi. I mean, that's their history. Yeah.

Specifically in security. And I'm talking go back to the days of Symantec. Yeah.

And McAfee. Yeah. And, and Cisco and, and all of them, they bought their innovation.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And that as someone who's been an entrepreneur in security for 25, 30 years now, that was always the promise. It was a pipe dream to think you were gonna have an IPO. I mean, that's 1% Right.

But a really good chance that you would get bought up by Yeah. You know, one of the bigger fish Yeah. For, for your ip or your talent Or your, your exit strategy is to Be, that was your exit strategy.

And you know, it's, it might, this might be this show, and Monday was an example of, and we'll talk about it later, Palo Alto Evers acquiring protected. But that, that was, that's typical. Yeah.

Typical. We might see an acceleration of it actually given the, well, You know, my, my sources in the Valley. Yes.

I heard, um, tell me that we're going to see a, a similar acquisition to the, uh, Palo Alto acquisition this week. Next this one. Wow.

Stay tuned. That's, Yes. Stay tuned.

That's good. But you bring up a great point about the innovation. Now, the only thing that concerns me is like companies like Cisco, that, that are, uh, and the ServiceNow's that are just constantly acquiring, are they doing a good job of integrating the technologies so That customer, you know, what they say the customers benefits, you gotta break a couple of eggs to make an omelet.

That Is true. So not what happens with these acquisitions is, you know, probably 10% of 'em fail. Mm-hmm.

Fail. Not that the acquisition doesn't take place, but the technology never makes its way, it turns out the technology is either too frail Okay. Or just not real, frankly.

Ah. And it doesn't make its way in. The founders take their money and leave.

Yeah. Yeah. The key brains get hired somewhere else.

This is the way of Silicon Valley. True. In the security world.

So probably 20 to 25% of acquisitions just they're broken eggs in the omelet factory. Okay. And yet, I think we're gonna probably see more acquisitions because the IPO pipeline isn't really panning out.

Absolutely. Great point. And the, the, the one, the IPO that everyone wants to happen, or is hoping it would happen, would be eventually open ai, but they, they're gonna have a problem making a transition to for-profit.

There's so much opposition. And the ags have to sign the ag in California has to sign off on that for it to happen for them to go to for-profit status. Not only that, the problem I think you're gonna have is that what valuation Right, Right.

At their present raises, They're 300 billion market. You're gonna have a IBM m They're probably more than IBM at this point. Wow.

You're gonna have an IPO for a trillion dollar company. Yeah. 'cause that's what it's gonna take for people early, you know, later money in to make some, you know, their normal return here.

Yeah. You're already seeing a bunch of lawsuits, not just Musk, but that there was a letter that was sent from former employees and Jeffrey Hinton in opposition to what open AI OpenAI wants to do. So, I mean, you've got that plus just the market reality of something like that.

Yeah. I mean, it's just, that's a, that's a, a high valuation. Yeah.

We had the CISO of open AI at our event yesterday, as well as the CISO anthropic. It was interesting speaking to both of them and hearing them talk about how important security is. Interesting.

Well, anthropic, I understand. Yeah. Both the same.

Yeah. The pressure to get out new models, The pressure. Yes.

They're constantly, they gotta release new models. Oh, but I, I just introduced the lightweights, right? Four ohs.

Yeah. Four ohs. Yes.

Um, free, but, you know, limited use. No, but the pressure to get them out Yeah. Makes it very hard to get security in.

Ah, that's what's, I think that's what terrifies the companies. The speed of which these, these models are coming out. It's like, wait a second.

Plus the benchmarks. They're, they're not what they appear to be. Right?

They, they, they're are. Yeah. But they're in this benchmark race, Claude's benchmark is higher than this ones, and that's, Gemini is better than that.

And these Chinese ones. And, and so that creates this race. Wacky races, right?

Yeah. But even the, I mean, the benchmark tests themselves are being questioned by third parties. They're saying, wait, this, this score that you were assigned, that's not what we found.

You know, this. So anyway, in a sense, it's buyer, buyer beware, but buyer has to buy It. It's all part of the gold rush.

Yeah. Yeah. It's all part of, But you're worried about the pressure.

It's absolutely there. We were talking about it yesterday with, there's Just the So much software being developed, they can't keep up from a security perspective. And that's, that's the challenge.

But the pressure is also on the Ciscos and the Palo Altos to say, what's your a what's your AI story? Story? What's your AI story?

Yes. You must have one. And That's what we're dealing with.

Hey, let's take a break. We're going to continue this trend of what's your AI story? Got an article John wrote yesterday.

You're watching Textron Gang. Hey, we're back here live. Well, we're not live.

This is recorded. But I am alive at RSA conference. You know, I've been coming to RSA conference since 2002.

It's two things you could always count on. At RSA. Number one, people are gonna put out their security reports, whether it's breach data, vulnerability data, or whatever.

They save their reports for RSA. So this way we could talk about 75 different security reports at the same time. Impossible to do.

Secondly, acquisitions m and a activity peaks at RSA conference every year, actually from RSA to black hat, this three month window. Interesting. You'll see all kinds of acquisitions.

The acquisition train, uh, yes. Started off yesterday with an you were On. Yes.

So Palo Alto Networks kept me very busy the last few days because they kept bearing me in news announcements. So they were announcing some updates to two of their main product lines. They were also an announcing an AI security platform that, uh, we could talk a little bit about.

But the big news, they, they buried the lead, as we say in journalism. They, they, they dropped this announcement. They're gonna buy Protect ai.

I don't know the, the value of the deal, but I think it's a rumored around $700 million. Pretty significant. Um, so in a sense, this acquisition plays into the AI security platform that Palo Alto Networks announced.

Um, it's, it's interesting. There's a, there, the Chief Product Officer, and again, as I want to be sure that I get what he says, right? Lee Cleri, we're gonna talk to you later today.

He, um, is, he said, AI agents and apps are transforming the way we work, blah, blah, blah. The attack surface isn't just expanding. It's fundamentally changing.

Um, the, the thing that most companies need is more point products to secure their use of ai, and they want to use best in class security, which means they're gonna buy companies that specialize in things that Palo Alto Networks maybe isn't especially adept at. And they wanna deliver this. Right.

Accu Accu architecture, and he uses a word platformization, is the, is that architecture. So in a long-winded way, they made their, their big play in a sense. I think what they're doing, and this has been going on for several weeks now, and I think Atlassian and even Nvidia, they understand the anxiety that's out there.

So they're, they don't wanna be a SW Switzerland, I'll put the words in their mouth, but they wanna be like a neutral site to help everybody given this AI agent Avalanche. Yes. They're, I I think JP talked about this last week.

We counted 25 AI agent platforms. They've been announced in recent months. So if you're within an enterprise, you're thinking, what am I gonna do?

Like, what do I use one source? Do I piece it together and are they compatible? What do I do?

I need someone to kind of glue it together and to secure it. And I think that's kind of the play that Palo Alto Networks made. They're gonna have a press conference later today, and they're gonna go into it deeper.

But, you know, it's a wise move and they got a lot of attention. Yeah. It's an important news.

And, but I, as, as Alan said too, they are not gonna be the last company probably this week or next that's going to make some sort of acquisition. And I think we might see, as you mentioned, and that's a very good point, between now and Black Hat and August, that's acquisition season. Mm-hmm.

In Security. In security. Yeah.

Always has been, you know, a couple things, John, to your points here, um, number one, in today's inflated AI market, 700 millions of mere bag of shells. Yeah. It's really not a lot of money though.

It's crazy money when you look at revenue, you know, is in as a multiple. This is insane. Yeah.

But, you know, one man's folly is another man's fortune. And maybe 700 million winds up being a bargain at some point. Secondly, though, Palo Alto is playing the big boys game Yeah.

In security. And I, you know, I, I had Daniel Newman here yesterday, and Daniel and I spoke a little bit about this. And to him, it was like a eureka thing to me.

It was being a security person, this is what they do. And when you look at the security landscape landscape, you have very small companies who make products. Yeah.

I mentioned it in the last segment. Small fish, medium fish, big fish. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Red fish, blue fish. Small companies make products, medium companies take those products and turn them into features.

Mm. Big companies take those products and features and build them into a platform. Mm-hmm.

Yes. That's a, Palo Alto is playing the platform game. Mm.

Right. Because that's the pinnacle when you're a platform, everything else plugs in. Yeah.

Whether it's APIs or, you know, marketplaces, or however else you wanna plug into this platform, including assimilation, you know, by the Borg, that's the game. The big boys play. Yeah.

This is a big boy 1 0 1 play. Textbook case. Yeah.

Textbook. Yeah. Do you, do you suppose, I mean, so we talked about, you talked about the cloud era earlier.

Yeah. So we always consistently hear the same message that what's happening with AI is a combination of everything that happened before. It's, except it's bigger than everything that happened before.

So I'm wondering, given what happened with Palo Alto Networks, do we see, does the acquisition narrative follow that same pattern where there's more acquisitions than before? Because there are more startups than before? Mm-hmm.

That's a great point. I mean, there are more people gold rushing. So yesterday they had the, um, innovation sandbox here.

Oh, sure. Yeah. 10 finalists this year.

Each of the finalists got $5 million. Wow. Whether they won or not, it was their, you are all winners, right?

5 million for you. 5 billion for 5 million for you, for you. They did an Oprah, I think out of the 10, eight of them, or nine of them were AI related, uh, companies.

80 to 90%. So you're going to see a plethora of these AI companies. Yeah.

90% of 'em, their exit strategy is acquisition, being acquired, fitting into a platform, or becoming a feature in someone's product that them goes into a platform. Th this is, this is how security's always been. It's nothing new.

Yeah. Um, It's funny you mentioned Symantec. I remember Gordon Eubank, remember him.

Sure. He was the CEO. Same thing that McAfee did.

It just gave me kind of a, just, just, just flashback. They would just acquire companies every other week. What's the story for customers though?

Because customers want simplicity in this age of security. Yeah. And AI and, and this amorphous spreading of the threat landscape.

What's Paolo's message to its customers and To, we are your source for ai. We are your source for We are your, We are your the clean story platform. We are.

Your platform Comes shopping through us. Right. If you need this, we have, we specialize in all this.

You're your Amazon. Yeah. For Ai.

It speaking. So, I, I, I used to work, I worked downtown San Francisco for about 30 years. And one of the things, and this is we hear so many stories about San Francisco and we're like, what?

It's gone through, right. Just living here post Covid, the AI environment and in terms of just like these little small companies that exist out of apartments or, or homes or small rental facilities, has really like, in a sense, and RSA in particular has rejuvenated the city in the last year. And so I think you're right.

This, this gold rush thing is, is, is kind of escalating to the point where there's so many opportunities for extreme specialization Yeah. That they're discovering across vertical markets, not just in general use. Right.

I'm thinking like healthcare, construction, manufacturing, uh mm-hmm. Place Surveillance. No.

AI is the applicable to all of These police surveillance that we kept, we keep talking about good and bad. Yeah. Um, The ride up here yesterday from San Jose up 1 0 1, the billboards for AI with all of these smaller companies trying to get a clear, concise message out why we are your shop for ai.

I lost count. That used to be an on one over. Lemme ask you a question though.

Are those billboards aimed at consumers? Or are they trying to get Palo Alto or someone else's? I think it's the latter.

Yes. Yeah. It, they that I didn't, I didn't feel a consumer message.

No. So, wait, so during the internet boom, if you wa, if you drove on 1 0 1, I used to do that every day to go to work. The billboards are everywhere.

And then they stopped for a while. Now they've returned and it's, it is overkill. I mean, it gets lost in the noise.

Ne Must Have had like 10, but they don't care about what we, the commuters think. No, they're, they're, They know who their audience is. Absolutely.

They know who their target Audience, if the VCs see it. Right. And the, you look more power to them.

Oh. You know, there will be a lot of winners. There'll be a lot of losers.

There'll be a lot of these AI companies that wind up not getting the $700 million Yeah. Exit. Yeah.

You know, my friend Brad Feld always said, if you're not in the top three, you're get out your history. Yeah. And, you know, because the top three get the multiples.

So, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna issue a mea culpa too, because we talked, I mean, off and on, we've talked about things like Apple and ai. And we, I always, and I've always kind of dig, take a, dig at them because I, I think they're innovation days of innovation are kind of over. But there was a survey that came out, I actually wrote about, so I wanted to just bring this up.

Survey came out that 80% of the people out there are willing to wait for what Apple does, and they're willing to pay at least $10. That's true. A month.

Wherever we, whatever they come out with. Most of 'em actually, were willing to pay like 20 bucks a month. Yeah.

And, and, and I think about like, the people who are gonna be eventually the winners, even though they're a little bit late to the market, which they always are. They always are. By, by design.

It's mo this time, I don't know if it's by design, I think it's by misstep as well. It could be. We talk about the winners.

I always wanna wonder what you guys, who you think are gonna be eventually the, the, the poll in the polls positions in ai. Because there's, there are more than three or five major companies that are kind of trying to, You know, if you look at every technical innovation plateau that we've had. Yeah.

The start of the internet, e-commerce. Yep. Cloud ai.

Now it's the same old company. Same. There's usually always one or two that come in, you know, from each of these new innovation things.

So who's gonna be the winners? Well, IBM's been a winner for a hundred and something years. They'll be a winner.

They'll be here. Apple, Google, meta, Microsoft. They'll all be here.

Microsoft, they'll be here. Maybe open AI is the AI dial darling. My, if I, if I was a betting man, anthropic will become part of a platform.

Yes. Yes. Maybe Amazon.

Yes. Um, I've heard that rumor I have too. Well, They've invested a ton of money.

They invested a ton of money. Yes. But so is Google for that matter.

Hey, so I was gonna, you mentioned at RSA, it's not to kind of a ris, but maybe to tell us what could possibly go wrong. So I talked yesterday with the SNCC CTO. His name is Danny Allen, who's here.

You know, I interviewed Danny. Danny. I know Danny.

He's a hockey player. Oh, I didn't know that. Um, oh, cool.

So he, but he said he was almost, I'm gonna quote him almost certainly within 12 months, if things continue at this pace, like the crazy pace things are, we're gonna see a major security breach involving ai, particularly things around the area in sales. Really sales. Because I always, So that's my fear.

I mean, I'm not hoping this happens, but I think it's an eventuality. It's inevitable that there will be some sort of like CrowdStrike like events. Mm.

And that's what keeps companies a little bit hesitant to go all in. 'cause they're afraid they are going to be the company like a Delta that goes through This. Nobody wants to be the next Headline.

Right. I mean, it will come and go, but they just, they just don't wanna accept the responsibility, even though they want all the riches at the same time. Well, the amount of data that sales has and marketing, I think though they're huge opportunities for attackers that the sales folks and marketing folks need to look at all this customer data.

And how do we make sure it's secure? They don't care. You don't think they care.

I wanna believe they care. I'll tell you what, like the better Approach Break up broken. There's, there's two, there's two aspects of a security incident.

You are talking about a breach where they stole all my sales and marketing data. Yeah. Yeah.

B-F-D-B-F-D. I don't care as long as I still have it and use it. 'cause I could sell better than them.

Or I, you know, whatever the bigger fear is sort of like a ransomware or a, or a CrowdStrike thing. Yeah. Where I, I can't get to my sales and marketing data then, then all of a sudden the wheels grind to Off.

I see, I see your point. Yep, yep, yep. That they worry about that.

Yes. Um, but, you know, someone breaking in and stealing my AI data. Yeah.

BF I'm thinking like a systemwide failure. Right? Yeah.

Although the ransomware thing like has legs. I mean, you just constantly hear about these companies just willing to pay Course they would. Yeah.

Just, just keep, if your sales and marketing shut down, you'd pay. Yeah. Believe me.

Yeah. Anyway, we're about ready for our next, uh, gang, uh, topic. We're gonna take a break.

We are here at RSA Moscon West. If you're watching this tomorrow, we'll be here tomorrow too. Come on in.

That's Wednesdays tomorrow. Today, tomorrow is today. When you're doing the gang, we'll be back in a minute.

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And, uh, block c Minimus launched a managed service, which Alan knows a lot about. So we're gonna, I'm gonna throw it to Alan, but, um, just again, this is like the Super Bowl. I don't know, maybe we should ask you first, how do you, we've, we've done this before.

How do you compare what goes on here to Black Hat? Are they two pretty similar shows now? It seems like it's kind of, they've kind of morphed into Yeah, so I've been coming to RSA since 2002, coming to Black Hat since 2003, though I don't go, honestly, I stopped going to Black Hat from 2010 or 11 through maybe 15, 16.

I just didn't feel like going out to Las Vegas In August. 110 degree wheeler. Yep.

Um, you know, there was a time when Black Hat was at Caesar's Palace. I remember that Defcon was at the Rio. Ugh.

And, you know, I, I was running still secure Mitchell, I, my friend Raj Raja Barga was the CEO. And we used to, we were exhibitors of Black Hat. It was exciting.

Yeah. What made Black Hat different than RSA was Black Hat was about security research. Mm-hmm.

Barnaby Jack, getting up there and making the ATM, rain Money Hacking pacemakers. I was terrified of using a cell phone there. Really?

I was, I was hacked in 2005 there. Really? Yeah.

Wow. iPhone, I think it was the iPhone three in 2005. Oh gosh.

Had a very bad thing. By default. It would, if you, if it was an SSID it recognized it would Yeah.

Go onto it. I didn't know it f*****g went. Excuse my language.

But You had that, that bulletin board of shame too. Yeah. The wall of Out it sheep.

That was the wall of really Wall Of sheep, wall of Shame. The wall of sheep. Of sheep.

Oh, that's right. Good memory. You Yeah.

I may have made it too. I, I, my iPhone three attached to an SSID that it had seen before, but it was a, you know, it was a, the decoy and I got hacked. Didn't realize it until I got home that Saturday morning.

I was coaching my little Bradley was four or five years old, 2005. It was four years old, five years old. And some of the mothers from the team called me that they had received some unusual, Unusual, Unusual emails from me with some very interesting pictures.

Oh, Wow. Yeah. Then I realized I was locked out of my blog, my mail, my domains, everything.

Wow. And, um, it was interesting. Yeah.

It took me, thank God I had good friends back then who was, I was able to get, like, retake my domains, retake my Google and Yahoo and everything. But how Long did that take You? A day or two?

Only because I was calling the head of security at that time. Because you have connections and says hey. Yeah.

Actually, I'll never forget this, one of a good friend Robert Hansen, ARS Snake, very famous security dude. Yes, yes. Robert found out who it was.

The guy's in jail right now for anti-Semitic Trop and all kinds of s**t, and he should rot there. But Robert helped me a lot. My friend Jeremiah Grossman, um, a lady from, well, she was at Microsoft at the time.

I don't know if you know Katie Uri. Mm-hmm. No.

She started the whole Bug Bounty program. Okay. And security.

Katie helped me. I had a lot of, you know, I'd been in this community a long time. That Was an Advantage.

And I had a lot of friends in, I was, I mean, I was terrified of it back then because I remember I would go back there with one of our guy, Byron Ato. I Remember Byron, we Were doing research for this book. Yeah.

And the community knew of that, what we were up to. And we were, You're better of just leaving the phone shut off in The room. So we did.

Yeah. But that's what black hat used to be. Okay.

It's not anymore though. What has it evolved into? When they moved into Mandalay Bay mm-hmm.

And it got very corporate. Mm-hmm. Jeff, what's his name?

Sold it. Jeff Moss sold it. Oh, okay.

It's part of Informa. Now. I'm not knocking Informa though.

They deserve it. They don't let enough press people into blackout because they like to keep their own press people there. Okay.

Um, but it really, it became RSA in the desert. Oh. It really, you don't see the research like you used.

Not same. It's the same as this, except in the desert and where this has about 45,000 people. I think Black hat's about 19,000.

Yeah. Okay. So let's Have to, oh, so, so what about minimus and man, well, Lemme talk about minimus.

Mike. Mike wrote this story. I think it's on security built, Probably.

Yes. So this is a new story, but an old story. Right.

Do you remember when we used to install windows on floppy Days? Oh my gosh. Mm-hmm.

And there was a time where Windows installed on three or four, those five and a quarter inch. The big ones. Yeah.

5 hard to, you know, floppies. And it went from five of those to 10 of those to like all day feeding them in. Like your, and we used to call bloat, wear bloat, bloatware.

Right. R os was full of bloatware. All those applications Microsoft installed that we never used.

It's the same thing in Linux. Distros, all the packages though in Linux you have more of a choice of what packages you want to install. Mac has it too.

They all do. Yeah. It extends to the platforms that the Palo Altos and everyone come out with.

So we've always been on a quest of all of that. Bloatware represents, uh, security, uh, exposure. Absolutely.

Right. It, it, it's your, it's your exposure. Uh, you know, like your skin.

It's, it's more exposure. There's a word, and I'm not thinking of it right now, but, um, so you want to reduce your exposure. You want to reduce your profile.

And so we all tried, well, not in the security industry. We've tried to boil down, get rid of the fact, get rid of the bloatware, get rid of unnecessary code so that my security profile, my attack surface, that's the word I'm thinking. Attack surface.

Attack surface. How do I shrink my attack surface? Yes.

Minimus is shrinking attack surface. They're taking your apps hosted and have taken out the bloat, taken out the unnecessary and shrunk your attack surface. Of course, the issue is they're going to, they did they take out anything I may want to use mm-hmm.

Just because 80% of the people don't mm-hmm. Don't use this particular feature. It may be important to me.

Right. You know, I, when I, I was talking to, I think it was a PR person yesterday about Minimist. They wanted to bring them by.

We may have 'em on the GA on our coverage here this week. Um, when I was at Suson last month, they're doing a very similar thing. SUSE is taking all of your most common Linux packages.

They're hosting them, just like minimis is hosting all. Mm-hmm. And they're taking out all of the bloat.

Mm-hmm. All of the security, making sure they're updated. And now you can get your Linux packages to your, you know, you get your distro that has the basics, but as you want more packages, you can download the SUSE version of them, which are stripped down, blot wear out.

Mm-hmm. Uh, hardened. And supposedly just a better choice.

Very similar to minimus. Now, when you're Susa and your, you have a distro of Linux that makes a great platform play. Right.

You're using my platform and here are the apps you want to use on my platform that I'm blessing. They're, they're hardened, they're stripped down, they're skinny. When you're minimist, my question is, there's a trillion apps out here.

Yeah. How many of them are you gonna host? Exactly.

I don't know. It'll be interesting. I mean, look, there's a set of a subset of apps that 80% of us use, and if they just focus on them Yeah.

There's a business there. That was a question that I had from, from your conversations about minimus. I love the name by the way.

Minimus, minimizing that attacks risk. But also with the app explosion, it's not gonna slow down. No, that's the thing.

That's the problem. All this acceleration. Right.

So How do they get, I mean, think about it. If I'm an app developer and I say, Hmm, we could get great distribution, can we get this into minimus? Have them minimize it.

Yeah. And put it in their SaaS. How much is minimus gonna charge for that?

What's the wait time? Yeah. Are they going to strip it down and not lose anything?

Essential. All of the above. I mean, this is, it's an interesting, interesting play.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

I just don't know how it scales in terms of how many apps you're putting in There. Yep. The apps for all.

Yeah. Yeah. But again, it's just like another example of a company that's offering a solution across the board.

It it's kind of platform neutral. I mean it's um, Well, you would think so. It's practical I guess.

You Think so? You would think. You'd think so.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But I mean, we'll see again, who knows? Yep. Well there will be a lot of companies launched here.

A lot of companies coming outta stealth. As a matter of fact, I mentioned Innovation Sandbox. Yes.

Another part, excuse me. Another part of the, uh, RSAC innovation program is Innovation Launchpad Innovation Launch, which your company's coming outta stealth. We're recording this Tuesday morning.

Tuesday afternoon, three 30 over at the YBAC. They will be announcing the winners of the, uh, innovation launchpad companies coming outta steal. Okay.

Okay. I don't think there's money attached to it, like there is Sandbox, but nevertheless, it's a great start if you're a young company. Oh, awesome.

Exciting, awesome. Very good stuff. Yeah.

Alright. Hey, what do you say? We wrap up?

Yes. All right. Good idea.

John. Lisa, thank you. Thank you.

Thanks for Having us, for coming in person. Great to be here in person. It's great to be here.

Sorry about my voice. I hope you've enjoyed this text. And again, we will be doing this again tomorrow and again on Thursday.

So stay tuned for that. But until then, this is a slightly horse Allen Shimmer at RSA conference. Stay with us everyone.