1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One other area along the lines of what you’re talking about that we are seeing is the notion of connectors. There are so many modular technologies in use right now. Enterprises are using so many different tools and so many cloud services. Connecting all these things together is a nightmare. It seems like there’s a whole connection layer opening up which also needs an infrastructure-level handling.

Eric Benhamou: We totally agree with that. It’s the same, general kind of opportunities. It’s dealing with contemporary, totally distributed, virtualized data centers where dependencies are extraordinarily complex and provisioning orchestration is also very complex.

Sramana Mitra: What is your analysis of the security situation? There are lots of security startups in the market right now. That has been true for the entire time that I have been in the industry. You’ve been in the industry much longer. There has always been a strong crop of security startups. Some of them do very well. It’s an active area of venture investment. What kinds of problems are we looking at currently as open opportunities?

Eric Benhamou: Your comment is right regarding how fertile the cyber security industry is. There are a few things that we really like about the cyber security industry. What we like is, in general, it is the closest segment to a meritocracy model where the better product has a better chance to win.

As a Chief Security Officer, you are not going to settle for second best or third best product even if you like the team. What matters is the product. I couldn’t say the same thing for many other sectors. We like that a lot because it means that even a small company, if it has a better approach, has a fair shot against a richer and bigger company. What we don’t like is the fact that just about everybody in the industry is smart. I’ve never seen a cyber security startup that is created by stupid people. They’re all smart.

The only difference is that some problems are absolutely critical to address. Others are not quite as critical. If you aim your gun at something that is not exactly the sweet spot of the market, you’re unlikely to get traction and unlikely to get your company off the ground. The challenge for us is to separate these companies in terms of which problem they’re addressing and if the problem is one of the top three problems that CSOs are facing every day or if it’s one of the top 20. If it’s one of the top 20, it’s not even worth it.

Let me give you an example of what I think is one of the top three threat vectors today that all CSOs are concerned about. Browser-borne malware is one of the top three threat vectors on enterprises. That dates back to the fact that when we first invented browsers in the Internet, we made the wrong assumptions.

We assumed that the Internet would be a very benign world. It has not turned out to be this way. Because we made the wrong assumptions, we did not create the browser as a rugged, resilient, well-protected structure. An HTML stream that comes into your browser and executes on your machine can do all kinds of nasty things that you cannot possibly detect. This is how malware gets in. There has to be a better approach than browsing that we all do every day.

If we do this with the existing tools, malware just has too easy a time getting into your machine and contaminating your application and your environment. It’s an essential problem to address. Another problem which I think you refer to in your blog is the fact that as applications move to the cloud, you have some exposure because your data is now in the hands of other people protected by other tools that you don’t control. You have to figure out a way to protect your data. These is another category of problems that comes with the cloud.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures
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