Charles Herring 10 November 2017
Server Rack

We started WitFoo because we were moved by the pain we were seeing on the faces of our customers in previous endeavors. We knew that there had to be fundamental changes to how security software supported the craft. We decided we would study, listen and follow the needs of our front line investigators. We would build what they need to win against adversaries and to communicate with their broader business.

Why of WitFoo

Loving our Baby

WitFoo is a tech company with some brilliant minds regularly coming up with ideas that have never been uttered. As a group of proud nerds we fall in love with these ideas and nurture them as we see the ideas become tangible features. The hardest question we ask each other and our customers is “Are we solving our heroes’ problems or are we loving our product??”

Losing my Religion

The first patent I filed for WitFoo is around our Temporal Link Analysis (TLA.) It was created to reduce the number of investigations, increase clarity and reduce investigative cycle time. Over a year into working with customers I woke to a terrifying realization: it wasn’t enough. We had spent months trying to force TLA to solve all problems. It is awesome tech. Why was it not working?!?

Fork in the Road

I remember staring at my the ceiling in utter despair pondering that I had started a company built on IP (intellectual property) that was interesting but potentially ineffective. I was paralyzed. As we discussed internally, we had two choices. We either had to monetize the patent by finding ways to make it useful or get back to the drawing board. After some somber conversations, we reminded each other that WitFoo was founded to deliver victory to the good guys in cyber-warfare not to sell cool tech.

Customer Centric

At WitFoo we have deleted 5 times the code we kept and support. We fail quickly and learn from those failures. We have great ideas that turn out to be cool but not useful (at least not now.) Staying grounded in a mission to give cybersecurity heroes what they need to win keeps us from pitfalls of tech hypnosis. When we build features, content, pricing or programs we ask “is this furthering our mission?” If the answer is no, cool tech goes into the git vault for another day. It is great to love our tech but we have to keep our eyes on our heroes.

The post Hypnosis of your Tech appeared first on WitFoo.

Tags

Original URL
https://www.witfoo.com/blog/hypnosis-of-your-tech/

About the Author

Charles Herring

Charles Herring

Co-founder & Chairman, WitFoo

I started WitFoo in 2016 to make information and operations shareable across the craft of cybersecurity — between companies, law enforcement, national security and insurers, who mostly cannot see what each other sees. Before that I was at Lancope and Cisco, and I began in 2002 as Network Security Officer for the Naval Postgraduate School.

I lead research and development on a platform that ingests trillions of messages a day across hundreds of clusters. It is sold as Conductor, Reporter and Analytics, licensed flat per appliance with unlimited data — because a team charged by the gigabyte ends up making coverage decisions on a spreadsheet, months before the incident that needed the logs they dropped.

Everything here is mine, not the company's, and it wanders. Corrections are genuinely welcome — I would rather be right than consistent.

A note on how this was written: I use artificial intelligence tools to help me research, check facts, and edit these posts. The ideas, the arguments, and any mistakes are mine. I read the sources, I check the claims, and I take full responsibility for what I publish here. The views are my own and the writing is my intellectual property.