Ross Haleliuk

Experienced operator & builder shaping the future of cybersecurity. Now working on something new. 

📙 Book about building the future of cybersecurity 👉🏻 cyberforbuilders.com
📬 Blog & newsletter 👉🏻 ventureinsecurity.net
🚀 Angel syndicate for security practitioners  👉🏻 visangels.com

"Write something worth reading or do something worth writing." —  Benjamin Franklin

“Life is too short to do mediocre work, and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.” — Stewart Butterfield, Co-Founder of Slack

"As you start to walk on the way, the way appears." — Rumi

In security or otherwise, trends are temporary. Stick to fundamentals.

Director of Product

My LinkedIn feed is full of people screaming that cyber is dying, and they could not be more wrong. It's really, really simple: 

- When companies are looking for network security, they go to Palo Alto and Checkpoint, not to Cisco and Juniper even though they built the underlying network layer. 
- When companies are looking for browser security, they go to Talon (now Palo Alto), they go to Surf, LayerX, you name it, and not to Chrome. 
- When companies are looking for cloud security, they go to Wiz, Upwind, Palo Alto, and such, even though cloud provides the basics. 

There are 2 key points everyone needs to understand: 

1. The layer zero players (you can look up a Venture in Security article where I explain this) have to offer security, but they don't compete on security. To them, security is a way to address sales objections ("We can't buy cloud if it's not secure", "We can't use your browser if it's not secure" etc.). They offer good enough solutions for SMBs, they provide okay solutions for some midmarket companies, but they always fall short for enterprise. 

2. When layer zero adoption grows, it expands the market. Cloud adoption only made cloud security a more urgent, and a harder to solve problem. Sure, some companies are happy with the capabilities offered by CSPs, but many aren't which is why we have Wiz. The more companies install Cisco devices, the more of them buy Palo Alto firewalls. The list can go on and on. 

I talked about this at length - that AI labs are turning into a Layer Zero, similar to cloud providers, networking vendors, browsers, and so on. That will eventually give them the ability to compete on having an all-in-one suite which will include security, but that will expand the market, not contract it. 

Lastly, if you are worried that frontier AI labs will "solve security", here's an anecdote for you. In 2004, Bill Gates predicted that the problem of email spam would be solved within two years. For context, Mimecast was a 1-year-old startup, and Proofpoint was a year older. 22 years later, and the spam problem has only gotten worse, while companies that were supposed to be gone are now worth over $20 billion combined. In theory, Microsoft had everything it needed to solve the email security problem but in practice, well, you know what happened.

More on Layer Zero: https://lnkd.in/gfmMihdU

Security product leader, author, advisor, board member and investor.

Has anyone vibecoded an EDR yet and put CrowdStrike out of business with the new model? Anyone? Not yet? 

There’s a massive difference between vibecoding a helper tool that writes emails and building enterprise-grade infrastructure software that has to survive the chaos of the real world, and I find it absolutely incredible that my feed seems to be littered with “insights” from people who can’t see that difference.
 
To enterprises, vendors aren’t just tools; they’re partners that help to keep their business running. If you’re a Series A startup, sure, vibecode whatever you need, move fast, break things, etc. (that’s what startups are). But, if you’re a company that

- Has offices and branch locations in multiple countries
- Has employees in different jurisdictions
- Has regulatory requirements across states and countries
- Has contractual SLAs it has to meet

…you’re not gonna vibecode your way out of those problems. You will continue to need robust products built by partners you have relationships with, trust and can rely on. 

AI 100% creates a real opportunity for disruption, but disruption isn’t about letting anyone vibecode their own EDRs or other foundational infra. The opportunity is that AI can finally automate the mundane work, let people offload some of their burdain to machines, and help them manage complexity that was previously impossible to keep up with. That’s what we should be focused on, and not on nonsense like pontificating if cyber companies will be around because Anthropic released a new model.

📬 Blog & newsletter 👉🏻 ventureinsecurity.net
🚀 Community for cybersecurity founders, advisors & investors 👉🏻 buildingcyber.io

Experienced operator & product leader shaping the future of cybersecurity. 

“Life is too short to do mediocre work, and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.” — Stewart Butterfield, Co-founder of Slack.

Riley Nickels

The biggest competitor of any security startup is almost never another startup. It’s the status quo, the spreadsheet someone built five years ago, some script or even some internal wiki page... Most of the companies you’re talking to haven’t even heard of the other early-stage vendors in your space. They’re not running bake-offs, they’re not comparing features, they’re just trying to survive the week and hope they get to go spend the weekend with their family instead of having to deal with some urgent issue again. 

What you’re really competing with is inertia, things like budget cycles that were locked nine months ago, a director who can't hire another person to maintain another tool, politics between different teams... All this stuff is invisible from the outside and nobody likes to talk about this at the conferences, but if you ask founders, you'll see that most deals just stall, they don't get lost to other startups (or even other platform vendors for that matters). Most of the time when deals get lost, that's because prospects decide to do nothing about the problem for whatever reason.

Security teams aren’t sitting around waiting for the next shiny product, they’re drowning in priorities, audits, incidents, and internal negotiations. That’s why distribution, trust, and timing matter so so much in security. If you can’t clearly articulate why this problem deserves attention now, and how you reduce friction, you won’t lose to a competitor, you’ll lose to “let’s revisit next quarter.” In security, the default decision is a "not now", so the biggest problem for startups is not differentiation is convincing people they should care to begin with.

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