The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:04:52 · Brendan Foody, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:52] S0: Super excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Harry. [00:04:55] S1: So I was thinking about how we're gonna structure this, and I was like, you know what? There's there's quite a lot of myths or rumors around McCaw. And given it's our second time, I thought I could kinda break the ice and just go straight for them. So myth number one that we're gonna tackle, but there was a hack or a leak or whatever. I don't know how you can... Terminology you call it, but a hack, And revenue's been flat. What's really happening with McCore? True or false? [00:05:20] S0: So there was an incident. All of the other parts are false, in that we obviously handled it very quickly. We were in touch with customers. We moved incredibly fast at engaging Mandiant and a bunch of other security consulting firms, and the company's been crushing it ever since. We've expanded our relationships with all of the Frontier Labs and added 300,000,000 in net new ARR in the last sixty days. [00:05:43] S1: 300,000,000 in sixty days? Fuck me. [00:05:46] S0: That's been pretty crazy, yeah. [00:05:47] S1: Keeping Where us were you when you found out about the hack and what did you do? Well, it was
00:05:47 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:05:47] S1: Keeping Where us were you when you found out about the hack and what did you do? Well, it was [00:05:52] S0: a Saturday, so I was in the office and I was talking with our engineering team. And I think the initial thing is of course, how are we communicating this to customers and trying to be very proactive about understanding exactly what happened, what was accessed, etcetera. And then how do we communicate this to the experts and just containing it, moving quickly on the comms. And then from there, of course, making sure that we put in place all the right things so that it never happens again. [00:06:21] S1: There's a brilliant poet, Roger O. Kipling, who said, you have to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. That is a time when everyone is losing theirs. Definitely. And by no means, wanna be patronizing when both young, you're younger than me. What do you do to stay calm when that is an oh shit moment?
00:06:21 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:06:21] S1: There's a brilliant poet, Roger O. Kipling, who said, you have to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. That is a time when everyone is losing theirs. Definitely. And by no means, wanna be patronizing when both young, you're younger than me. What do you do to stay calm when that is an oh shit moment? [00:06:37] S0: Well, it's interesting because I feel like throughout the lifetime of the business, I have been through a lot of very stressful moments. That was definitely stressful, but it definitely wasn't close to the most stressful one. Seriously. Yeah. I mean, there's been times when I'm freaking out about making sure we get something right with a customer or whatever it is, but part of it is that there was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business. And so having a thorough understanding of what actually happened and having really strong relationships with customers gave us a lot of confidence that we would get through it, be on the other side even stronger. And we used to have six values as a company, but we added a seventh value as security to make sure it's very ingrained in the culture. But I think that, yeah, just that confidence that we know what's going on and that there's sort of this echo chamber on X that we need to hedge against a little bit. Do you pay attention [00:07:37] S1: to it, and do founders need to pay attention to it? Definitely.
00:07:37 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:07:37] S1: to it, and do founders need to pay attention to it? Definitely. [00:07:40] S0: I mean, I think founders need to pay attention to it. Like we had an all hands with a company where we just laid out, here's exactly what's happening, here's the trajectory of the business. And I think that was very helpful to the entire team. But it was definitely annoying that there were all of these people saying things that didn't actually happen and we couldn't quite speak out against them too explicitly. Otherwise, there's going to be the Twitter mob circling and all these recommendations from lawyers, etcetera. [00:08:07] S1: The hard thing is there are often a lot of people with economic incentives behind the scenes Totally. Who will absolutely trounce you and be very negative because they are aligned to a competitor or, you know, we're in a YC company that's been through a lot of shit in the last few days, and that competitor has a lot of people behind them through various different means. And the alignment is not obvious, but it really sounds out on Twitter. [00:08:30] S0: That is exactly what happened. And like, I can even think of one person that's very prominent who's invested in multiple competitors and just like made this tweet about how all [00:08:41] S1: of our data was getting accessed by China when it was totally untrue. You mentioned adding security as a seventh pillar there. We've seen so many hacks. It's almost become normalized, as awful as that sounds. Yeah. Are we about to enter a golden age of cyber given the new threats awakened by AI?
00:08:41 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:08:41] S1: of our data was getting accessed by China when it was totally untrue. You mentioned adding security as a seventh pillar there. We've seen so many hacks. It's almost become normalized, as awful as that sounds. Yeah. Are we about to enter a golden age of cyber given the new threats awakened by AI? [00:08:59] S0: I think so. I mean, we're even seeing this on the customer side, where our customers obviously are very focused on how do we improve the model cyber defensive capabilities, so that we can have the best AI security engineer that is able to defend every enterprise from all of these attacks. Because in our incident, it was the attacker that used a swarm of coding agents to help get access to the system as is happening in a lot of these. And so I think there's going to be an enormous boom in AI security engineering tools and various forms of defense that are able to help protect companies against all of the increasing waves of cyber incidents that are just getting started. [00:09:41] S1: Can I just be very naive and dumb here? How do the swarms of coding agents make for such dangerous and malicious actors? How does
00:09:41 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:09:41] S1: Can I just be very naive and dumb here? How do the swarms of coding agents make for such dangerous and malicious actors? How does [00:09:48] S0: that actually work? When a normal attacker is trying to find vulnerabilities, they can only review so much code and go through a certain portion of it at a human speed bound by the amount of people in their team, versus when they're using swarms of agents, they're able to be very exhaustive in reviewing the entire code base, looking at the entire front end, all the different things that they've accessed. And so that has allowed a lot of these attackers to just move much more quickly. And so we've been exploring various collaborations with customers and how we can strengthen their cyber defensive capabilities to hedge against exactly this type of attack as well. [00:10:27] S1: In terms of those various customers, true or false, you lost OpenAI and Meta's customers in the hack? [00:10:34] S0: False. Our relationship with OpenAI is stronger than ever. Obviously, I can't speak too much to specific customer relationships though. [00:10:41] S1: Can I push on Meta?