Gili Raanan - Cybersecurity Investment Playbook
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm, Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My
guest today is Gilly Renaud. Gilly is the founder of Cyberstarts, a VC firm focused on cybersecurity and the world's first VC that is majorly backed by cyber entrepreneurs. CyberStart's fifty million dollar first fund exploded to close to $2,000,000,000 in just three years. Gilley describes cybersecurity today as the perfect storm where global conflicts and AI advancements are creating unprecedented threats. He talks about CyberStart's Sunrise methodology, which uniquely identifies customer pain points before building solutions. We discuss a focus on finding resilient talent, overcoming person
I've been so excited
to do this with you in part because in the 500 or so episodes of this, I don't think I've ever talked about the thing you invest in, primarily cybersecurity. And because your personal investing story and life story is so damn interesting, we're gonna go all over the place. Maybe you can just give us the very high level state of the union in cybersecurity today. Cybersecurity for over thirty five years.
Not happy to admit it, but that's reality. So I believe I do have a perspective on it. We live in days where it's actually the perfect storm in cybersecurity for various reasons. And when I look back at the days, I founded CyberStart short of seven years in 2018. It wasn't the case. In 2018, cybersecurity was considered a boring portion of IT. I think that what we see today is that there's a global powerhouse conflict that drives major forces into cybersecurity. It's the Ukrainian conflict, the Gazan conflict, it's all over the world. Offensive cybersecurity became a lethal weapon or even stra
I'm curious if you could analogize cybersecurity offense and defense to simple military concepts or something like this. Like, if I think about the evolution of kinetic warfare from muskets up through nuclear weapons or something, is there some similar escalation of the tools being used by attackers and defenders in cyber? Have the targets changed over time? The goal of the attackers changed over time? If I were to think about the evolution of the battle, what are the key steps in that evolution?
Think about modern warfare and the use of technology. It started with better analysis, better decision making process. Then it moves to human augmentation. Think about the introduction of the first tanks in the First World War or the introduction of the Kalachnikov. It made humans more lethal. But with AI, there are additional steps. It's the workflow automation and then the final step where AI takes control. And if you think about a modern warfare,
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