Contrary Research Rundown #65
The biggest prize in cybersecurity, plus new memos on Groww, AcuityMD, and more
Research Rundown
We’ve touched before on the critical role of identity, and how 80% of breaches occur as a result of identity issues. In our latest deep dive, we dug deeper into the evolution of identity and how its become one of the most critical attack surfaces today. Here’s an excerpt from the deep dive:
In a March 2023 piece about Palo Alto Networks ($PANW), Rak Garg observed that the network has dissolved as a useful enterprise perimeter:
“When [PANW] started [in 2005], networks defined the enterprise perimeter. Securing the network was consequently the highest-value place to be. Over the ensuing decades, the network perimeter dissolved with remote work and cloud-distributed applications. Palo Alto’s firewall products, once 90%+ of revenue, comprise 60% of the business today. We expect revenue share to decrease as the company scales its Prisma offering, delivering security over the cloud, and invests in new products.”
Perimeter erosion created serious trust issues within the security community. If you can’t trust the messages you’re getting, you have to trust the person sending them. That means you have to figure out who the person is, why they’re trying to interact with you, and whether or not you should open that message.
The identity landscape consists of public companies, like Okta and CyberArk, take-privates, like Centrify, ForgeRock, Sailpoint, and Ping Identity, and dozens of startups. Those startups are fueled in part with billions of venture capital invested each year. It’s obvious to just about everyone that, as a company, you want to exercise control over who has access to which of your files and applications. It’s noncontroversial that employees should have to verify that they are employees before mucking around your systems. And it’s well understood that you set up a few policies, do an audit of who uses what and why, and issue a couple of proclamations to your organization every couple months (”Folks, stop inviting your friends and family to our Jira instance”) and you’re secure! Just kidding.
To read our full deep dive, check out our deep dive, Identity Crisis: The Biggest Prize in Security.
AcuityMD is a commercial intelligence platform tailored for the medical device industry. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Software Engineer - Remote
Groww is a financial services platform which enables its customers to invest in mutual funds, trade in domestic and US stocks, build systematic investment plans, and track their investments more easily. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Knowde is an online marketplace for producers and buyers of ingredients, polymers, and chemistry. Knowde’s marketplace allows buyers to search, compare, sample, quote, and purchase products from thousands of producers in one platform. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Back-End Software Engineer - Remote
Product Manager Intern (Paid) - Remote
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Power | Remote - Product Designer, Business Operations, Growth Engineer
Armada - AI Prodcut Manager (SF), Sr. AI Engineer, Backend Engineer (Bellevue, WA), VP of Finance (Remote)
One of the last remaining survivors of the D2C wave in the early 2010s is closing shop. SmileDirectClub announced it was shutting down operations; a far fall from its $8.9 billion valuation at IPO.
Rex Salisbury sat down with Arik Shtilman, the CEO of Rapyd, to unpack the company’s rise and early work with Uber and Google.
Epic Games recently won its lawsuit against Google, claiming the company was unfairly using its monopoly power as an app store to charge 30% fees.
This week, when users accused Mistral of being less-than-open for prohibiting using its models to train / improve other models, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch removed the limitation. For more on Mistral, check out Ben Tossel’s breakdown on the company.
Lattice CEO, Jack Altman, announced he was stepping down as the company’s CEO, and hiring Sarah Joyce Franklin in his place. He mentioned wanting to return to the earlier stages of building a company. To learn more about Lattice, check out our memo.
News broke this week that dog food company, The Farmer’s Dog, had reached $800 million of revenue.
Business Insider published a deep dive into trying to understand what, exactly, Adam Neumann is building with his new residential real estate company, Flow.
Register here for our next Tech Talk on Jan 30th, 2024, in SF - featuring founders & senior engineering leaders from Stytch, Figma, Linear, and Hex!
Hosted by Contrary’s tech team, it’s an evening built by engineers for engineers — each company will live demo their latest features for leading builders in the Bay.