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1/ I am so happy to see the @signalsciences acquisition by @Fastly. It got me thinking about how amazing it was to see the arc of this company and how its success has a lot of personal meaning for me (besides being an investor).
2 / In fall of 2008 I was several weeks into my job as CTO at Etsy when we had a security assessment done by iSec Partners. A guy I had never met named @ZaneLackey (now one of @signalsciences co-founders & CISO) came in to do the hands-on work.
3/ Verdict as I remember: “worst security assessment we have ever seen.” The report gave me nightmares & kept me up at night (for real). It was a board-level issue. It made me hate my life. Fixing security issues and not building features is important but is a thankless grind.
4/ As much as that sucked, I truly enjoyed working with @ZaneLackey. He taught me a lot about security and became my gold standard for security know-how. I dreamed of having him on the team.
5/ As I rebuilt the engineering team I hired (now @signalsciences CTO) @NGalbreath via an @allspaw intro & part of his work was building out a security team. He came to me one day and said, “I think I can hire @ZaneLackey.” I was like, “DO IT!!” Nick made it happen.
6/ Zane came to work for us on the inside. (Yay!) Making that leap from the nightmare security assessment to Zane joining only took about three years. (See what I call “slow recruiting” from a guest post I did on @avc) https://avc.com/2012/07/mba-mondays-guest-post-from-chad-dickerson/
7/ @kellan had joined ~ 1 yr earlier & @allspaw had been there for ~2 yrs at that point. It was a magical time where things came together as the talent & tooling we had painstakingly built started to pay off. We let board members ( @fredwilson) deploy code! https://avc.com/2011/02/continuous-deployment/
8/ Conventional wisdom at the time was that continuous deployment was bad for security (anyone can deploy any time?!) But @ZaneLackey & @NGalbreath locked arms with the engineering/ops teams & made moving fast a security feature, not a security bug.
9/ They created a model of intense partnership with developers. The needless artificial wall was gone. We, not us vs. them. I was blown away by the quality of the work they did and the spirit with which they did it. I still am.
10/ And @AMPeters06, now CEO @signalsciences was a great leader at Etsy, always showing up & delivering where he was most needed. Many nights we were last in the office taking care of loose ends and finishing what needed to be done. He acted like a CEO well before he was a CEO.
11/ The personalities and ways of working of these founders were baked into a product that flew off the proverbial shelves. They productized some of the magic I got to see up close. They put the culture they espoused into a product. I’m not surprised they have been so successful.
12/ For me, to have seen Etsy go from terrifying security to a world-class security operation to helping create the conditions that launched a security startup that sold today for $775 million makes me really happy (though I had zero to do w/ the last part)
13/ And it couldn’t happen to people who deserve it any more than them. Congrats again to the team! I am so grateful to have worked with each of you. /end
