Cylance

When something goes down, they're getting kicked in the back alley.

They can say it was IBM's fault, they can say it's Cylance fault-

Yeah

...

Um, I, I actually, uh, learned about Obsidian very early, I think.

So Obsidian Security, for those that may not be familiar, was basically a baby of Carbon Black and Cylance.

So Carbon Black and Cylance were two of the leaders in the early next generation endpoint security space.

So they really pioneered, you know, the, uh, application of endpoint detection and response, machine learning as applied to, you know, uh, detecting and responding to threats on compute endpoints.

Uh, those, those, uh, Carbon Black and Cylance respectively were pioneers in that space.

Um, I was connected with the CTO and co-founder of Carbon Black, Ben Johnson, who when, uh, Rackspace was acquired through a privity equity, a private equity transaction, basically reached out to me and was like, "Hey, you know, we see that Rackspace is exiting.

You've been really engaged in building managed cybersecurity solutions in public cloud.

Um, I'm teaming up," and this is Ben saying this, "I'm teaming up with my former competitor from Cylance, and we're gonna go disrupt the SaaS space the way that we did with legacy, you know, antivirus and the pioneering and, and development of next generation endpoint security," right? And to me that was fascinating because at Rackspace at the time, uh, I was leading security product engineering, so I was responsible for the research and development, architecture, you know, testing of, of cybersecurity services in public cloud.

And that was not his first time doing it.

He did the same thing at Cylance, taking them from zero to 200 million and a billion plus sale.

So when you look at Nick, you're like, if there's somebody that knows how to take an endpoint security solution to market, that's the guy to bet on.

And from our perspective, if we're going to bet in a very, very noisy market, that's the place we're going to put our money.

You should probably look into that." Right? That was over ninety percent of the time.

Um, so it, it made a lot of sense for companies to come in and, and, and innovate like Cylance and CrowdStrike and SentinelOne.

You also had the cloud as kind of this new technology where, okay, so I can collect all this, uh, forensic data, and I can actually have somewhere to store it for a while so that you can do the incident response, the investigation, the threat hunting.

So I think you had both kind of a breakdown of the current model, and you had techno-technology opportunities for a new wave.