Mark Suster

2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to @salesforce). Now @UpfrontVC looking to invest in passionate entrepreneurs.

[Dan Senor @dansenor]

Regardless of where you stand on this election, it’s moving to see @gadi_eisenkot accompany former hostage Gadi Moses to his polling place to vote…in Kibbutz Nir Oz. On October 7th, 2023, one in four residents of Nir Oz were killed or taken hostage. After being massacred, Israelis rebuild their communities to flourish. One of many signs of Israel’s promise: the ballot box.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

Powerful words from a thoughtful leader

[Michael Eisenberg @mikeeisenberg]

I was quite emotional this morning. I davened (prayed) at 6am. Then, I voted. In democratic elections. I then read about the $2+ Billion acquisition of 🇮🇱 quantum computing company Qlassic by intel. I was thrilled for our friends and colleagues who backed and built Qlassic. And, on a small personal level, I am excited by the new book I was privileged to write that is arriving in stores today.

On the voting line at 7 a.m. I met a female soldier with an M16 slung on her shoulder. A yeshiva student. Elderly people and professors. Some with yarmulkes and others without. We live in neighborhood in this city where you see everything and everyone.

I also thought about my children who are voting at special ballot boxes because they’re in the army or on the front lines now.

I want you to stop and think for a minute. Almost any other country that would have gone through what we in Israel went through would not have made it to this moment. Massive protests, covid, a 7 front war, fractious politics and cacophonous social media. Indeed, arguments and disagreements are very present — but even this morning, people who will vote differently from one another at the ballot box will then get in the same tank and share a shabbat dinner. They are willing to give up their body and soul, one for the other, for something greater than themselves.

Before I cast my vote this morning, I paused and thought about those who unfortunately and tragically didn’t return from the front lines and the hostages that did not return from captivity. Our biological family and our Israeli family. It is our first election since October 7th. My eyes teared up.

I then thought about the heroism and self-sacrifice of young Israelis: the hundreds of days of service by our soldiers—our children—and their families stationed on the front lines and holding down the home front so that we may merit to live as free people in our land after two thousand years. This is no trifling matter. Our ancestors would have given arms and legs to have this gift. Many people around the world yearn for our freedom.

We are privileged to be part of this incredible people and this amazing country at this extraordinary time. We are fortunate and blessed. I feel personally fortunate and blessed.

Am Yisrael Chai. 🇮🇱

[Mark Suster @msuster]

So grateful to have leaders like Ritchie who are vocal and truthful on this. Many leaders are neither

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@zachtratar https://t.co/ebHB7ySpfP

[Ashkan Karbasfrooshan @ashkan]

As a born Muslim, I always thought there were two types of Muslims:
1) Those who said they hated the Jews, and
2) Those who just kept it to themselves.
Don't hate the messenger!
I now see a third cohort.
3) Those who produce political ads and run it on air.
I legit thought this was an SNL skit. This is an incitement for violence. If a TV ad attacked Muslims, Blacks, LGBTQ crowd etc. I would sincerely call it out, as well.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

Case in point … Democrats need to be more vocal about how much Jew hatred is in their Michigan attack ads

[Jamie Metzl @JamieMetzl]

Unless Abdul El-Sayed immediately demands that this campaign ad be taken down and unequivocally condemns it and its creators, he will be exposed as a vile, dangerous, and divisive antisemite. Any (of my fellow) Democrats who condemn the disgusting Ramaswamy ad in Ohio but do not condemn this deserve our unflinching contempt.

[Ashkan Karbasfrooshan @ashkan]

As a born Muslim, I always thought there were two types of Muslims:
1) Those who said they hated the Jews, and
2) Those who just kept it to themselves.
Don't hate the messenger!
I now see a third cohort.
3) Those who produce political ads and run it on air.
I legit thought this was an SNL skit. This is an incitement for violence. If a TV ad attacked Muslims, Blacks, LGBTQ crowd etc. I would sincerely call it out, as well.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

💯

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

Having been both an investor and the one asking investors for intros, I disagree.

Your investor knows your company, but you should know how to pitch it to a specific prospect. Which customers, use cases, or proof points will resonate? That’s context you have and they probably don’t.

Asking for a blurb isn’t laziness. It’s asking the person who knows the product best to help sell it.

The investor brings the relationship. The founder brings the pitch.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@zachtratar Zach. Framing the argument as “Israel is the reason your groceries are expensive” is specially targeting Jews. “I’m pretty sure they have universal health care - we must be funding that”

If that doesn’t strike you then let’s just agree to disagree but appreciate your engaging

[Mark Suster @msuster]

I’m not sure your question is genuine but if it is
- how about if you don’t single out one country when many get aid (like Jordan, Egypt, etc)
- how about if you acknowledge aid is in US interest as a partner in the region
- how about not equating aid to price increases
- how about if you acknowledge Hamas and Israel are at war

Anything else? I have 20 more arguments. But I suspect none matter to you

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@rollingwitwheat @zachtratar A 25-year old with a degree gets that singling out one country with slight-of-hand math and blaming that country for prices of goods at home isn't a criticism of a government. It's dishonest and disingenuous. And that is on purpose

[Ray @RayFromNYCity]

Israel receives $3.8B a year, of which $2.7B must be spent with US defense contractors—a jobs program for a vital US industry employing Americans. $1.1B goes to Israel.

Jordan receives $2B a year, of which $400M must be spent in the US; the rest is economic aid.

Jordan receives more cash than Israel, yet Abu Al-Sayed never blames it for expensive groceries.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@zachtratar Anti Jew propaganda is hidden in dog whistles like blaming: globalists, greedy capitalists & Israeli-targeted criticisms (devoid of real facts). So it's no wonder recipients often don't see it. But the perpetrators know what they're doing.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

So grateful to have leaders like Ritchie who are vocal and truthful on this. Many leaders are neither

[Ritchie Torres @RitchieTorres]

FACT: The annual funding Israel receives from the US amounts to less than one-tenth of 1% of the federal budget. Less than 1/10th of 1%.

FACT: That annual funding would cover only a few hours of federal health care spending. A few hours.

Yet politicians who specialize in scapegoating would have you believe that Israel is responsible for America’s affordability crisis.

Like every form of scapegoating before it, it is a dangerous lie.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@alanwells @pzakin Yikes. Sound like it

[Mark Suster @msuster]

I’ve been hearing so much about this in the last 72 hours.

It started when our most technical partner (@pzakin) sat down with our leadership team and talked through the risks the industry faced due to accelerating AI models and poor readiness / defense.

So I started reading as much as I could but so often it’s hard to separate scare from reality. Y2K from Covid. It seems more like the latter risk level. I don’t have answers but it does seem like the next 60 days will be relatively tumultuous as we work through it.

I’m grateful that leaders like Nikesh are stepping up to share their thoughts. I hope more will. I suspect many are also deeply planning how to help and what to do about it.

Personal obvious small personal steps
- 2fa everywhere with Authenticator
- seriously hardened passwords behind one hardened one in a trusted password manager
- at minimum some basic home prep (water, food, etc)

[Nikesh Arora @nikesharora]

It's been an eventful week. Multiple vulnerabilites in Internet facing software, coding repositories, examples of agent behavior that seem concerning and a flurry of security specialists with solutions that can partially solve your problem. There in lies the challenge. Given the state of IT and security infrastructure, no one solution works. Let's break it down:
1/3
1. Vulnerabilites are being found and will continue to be found as models get more capable, the fragmented nature of the effort denies us the opportunity for a comprehensive find and replace option.
2. Even if all vulnerabilities could be found instantly and patches available - we will be reliant on the ability of enterprises to deploy all these changes at speed. It is not clear what the collateral impact of all these patches will/could be to our infrastructure of deployed en masse.
We will need a hybrid patch approach.
3. Virtual patching(VP) is needed in conjunction with direct patching but for a comprehensive (VP) solve you have to be lucky enough to have "modern frontier defenders" (Cyber companies that have vaulted infrastructure that can create patches at speed and push content rapidly to protect their customers) you need them for your network traffic, your traffic to applications on the cloud, your WAF, your end point.
4. There will continue to be patches that will need to be deployed directly but virtual patching will take the heavy load off.

2/3 Medium term solve:
Unfortunately token economics and current cyber architectures will not allow for defender swarms to contend with an offensive attack launched using agents. (Some x pundits who aren't steeped in cyber should take heed). Yes, theoretically we should aspire to have these agentic swarms defend us when we are under attack, unfortunately an attack is a sniper moment, chained vulnerabilities, cloaked attack followed by swift exfiltration. It's a speed program not a brute force problem.

To solve for this, enterprises need to get their SOC architecture right, logs, feeds, cyber products orchestrated via a modern SOAR for swift response. Only then can we deploy agents to detect and remediate. In addition, enterprises need to modernize and dare I say platformize their perimeter stack to ensure consistency.

Unfortunately, enterprises still seem to not see the urgency across the board, decisions are stuck, CIO/CISO's have a lot on their plate. While some honestly have bit seen the scale of such a problem before and it's hard convincing the organization that one needs to open the floodgates on modernizing the IT and security infrastructure. So we will continue to see environments being brought down to patch today it's for PHP, tomorrow it will be for the next one.

3/3 AI deployments are the"wild wild west" - LLM capabilities are expanding faster than we can build products to secure them. Sure an agent will jump across guardrails in a research lab, which is a lesson for all of us to deploy agents securely. But there is a lag between the discovery, the availability of that in a public model and the time needed for the cyber industry to build governance or an antidote. And no, dear frontier lab friends, the world cannot just trust you to build the solve. The infrastructure industry in tech builds and the cyber industry secured and provides assurance to the boards and organizations around security and safety.

AI security is the new attack surface. CEOs (present company included) want AI adoption, getting the pace of adoption wrong could be the last decision we make, at the same time "deploying it wrong" could have the same consequence.

There are billions of dollars being spent on coding, is your coding harness secure? Start there. If agents can jump guardrails, they can hide stuff in code.

Validate business outcomes needed, test your user case and ensure agentic deployments are well guard railed. Deploy a second set of eyes to watch your deployments for drift, compliance and verifiability.

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@AccBalanced @pzakin I hope that’s true. I’m here to learn. Not an expert in that topic

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@amybuildsAI @pzakin Just that it’s going to take a few months to work through. Not in any way scientific

[Mark Suster @msuster]

@elian_mcc @pzakin Yeah. But then it’s what people said to me in Feb 2020 and I listened. And was prepared “just in case”

[Mark Suster @msuster]

Aaron is one of the voices I plan to follow most as we work through these issues. Rationale, technical, empathetic, experienced.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Good assessment of the on the ground reality for security in most large enterprises right now. The fragmented landscape of the risk surface is only going to get more gnarly, making it even more complex for enterprises to solve.

There’s a never ending set of libraries to keep up with, tools to leverage, and sprawling infrastructure, data, and code to secure. Most large enterprises can barely keep up with this, let alone smaller startups or most companies outside of tech.

In many cases enterprises need to work to modernize their tech stacks. Data, in most organizations, is highly fragmented which means you don’t really know the state of risk at any given time. Some systems are open up privileges too broadly, and others are operating primarily via security through obscurity. Lots of upgrading here to do.

Once you can get your data and infra into a better spot, at least you have a chance for agents to help you secure the environment. Agent swarms can fan out, leverage any security tool, test various perpetuations of attacks, read through logs, process enterprise data for risk level, and more. This capability only emerged in the past few months, and none of it would be possible before we had long running agents and computer use good enough.

This is a huge area of opportunity right now for every layer of the security stack across identity, firewall, network, code scanning, data protection, and more. And it’s at least one reason to be optimistic about the balance of offensive and defensive capability.

But everyone does need to do the hard work of getting the basics right at the start.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

This really is one of @BillMaher’s best-ever monologues, and I don’t say that just because I got a namecheck. Tldr: Socialism is what old people already get and young people want a piece of it.