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JAM PITCH DECK (RESOURCE)

The original pitch deck for Jam’s seed round.

FREE SAAS WEBSITE KIT (TEMPLATE)

Components, sections, 3D assets, and page templates for Framer & Figma.

TOO SMART FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

While intelligence is highly prized, it can also lead to detrimental outcomes such as overconfidence, disregard for insights from less credentialed individuals, and resistance to change due to an attachment to one's intellectual reputation. These pitfalls prevent smart people from adapting to new information and embracing the best ideas.

FIRST-TIME VERSUS REPEAT FOUNDER

While repeat founders may have some advantages when it comes to startup success, a recent report indicates that first-time entrepreneurs still have a fair chance of success. Although serial entrepreneurs find it easier to secure venture capital funding and negotiate favorable terms, nearly 18% of first-time founders managed to achieve a successful exit.

EXPONENTIAL GROWTH AND AI ESCAPE VELOCITY

AI Futurist Ray Kurzweil invented the law of accelerating returns, which states that the rate of progress is increasing at an exponential rate over time. In a recent discussion, Kurzweil explored various topics including prospects that are only getting better, the direction in which the AI economy is headed, human relationships with AIs, longevity escape velocity, and much more.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES YOUR STARTUP IS BOUGHT?

This analysis examines the acquisition rates of 553 startups acquired in 2023 from Pre-Seed to Series D rounds.

EXPANDING BEYOND FOUNDER-LED SALES

B2B founders should prioritize hiring a Sales Development Representative (SDR) over an Account Executive (AE) as their first sales hire. SDRs specialize in generating leads and setting up meetings, enabling founders to focus on closing deals more efficiently.

THE SOUL OF YOUR WORK

Truly standout products have something extra: a soul. It's this hard-to-define quality that elevates products from merely functional to memorable.

ROKU HACKERS BREACH 15,000 ACCOUNTS AND ARE SELLING THEM ONLINE

Roku has disclosed a breach in which hackers accessed 15,363 customer accounts and associated credit card data through credential-stuffing attacks. The hackers changed some account logins, enabling unauthorized streaming subscription purchases. Accounts are being sold online.

QNAP WARNS OF CRITICAL AUTH BYPASS FLAW IN ITS NAS DEVICES

QNAP released an advisory about its NAS software products. Three vulnerabilities have been discovered, one of which allows unauthenticated users to compromise systems. QNAP is urging users to update ASAP.

STANFORD: DATA OF 27,000 PEOPLE STOLEN IN SEPTEMBER RANSOMWARE ATTACK

Stanford University has announced that the personal information of 27,000 people was stolen in a ransomware attack in September that targeted its Department of Public Safety network. The attackers did not gain access to other systems. The Akira ransomware group claimed responsibility for the attack in October and has since published the stolen data on its dark web leak site.

4 SECURITY TIPS FROM PCI DSS 4.0 ANYONE CAN USE

Compliance standards like the new PCI DSS 4.0 increasingly align with security best practices, making them more relevant for security teams. With its transition period ending in March, PCI DSS 4.0 provides an opportunity to examine how the updated requirements impact security professionals' priorities within governance, risk, and compliance efforts.

THE AWS S3 DENIAL OF WALLET AMPLIFICATION ATTACK

A novel attack method on AWS allows attackers to create a large amount of RANGE requests for parts of large (>1GB) files before quickly canceling the request. This bills owners for the full request, which can result in a 50x cost amplification. This post discusses defenses against this attack and why current remedies fail.

HOW BOTTLEROCKET OPTIMIZES EKS WORKLOADS

A comparison of the available EKS optimized base OSes for security and scalability. Amazon Linux 2023 provides consistent improvements over Amazon Linux 2, but Bottlerocket, which was designed specifically for container orchestration, trumps both. Bottlerocket provides strong security defaults while providing a minimal host OS as it strips out traditional tools like shells and interpreters that are not necessary for container orchestration.

CLOUDGRAPPLER

CloudGrappler is a tool designed for effortless querying of high-fidelity and single-event detections related to well-known threat actors in popular cloud environments such as AWS and Azure.

HAITI

A CLI tool (and library) for identifying hash types.

NEMESIS

Nemesis is a data enrichment pipeline and operator support system for offensive security. It automates a number of repetitive tasks operators encounter on engagements.

BIDEN'S BUDGET PROPOSAL BOOSTS CISA FUNDING TO $3B

President Biden's proposed $7.3 trillion budget seeks to boost cybersecurity funding. It includes $3 billion in funding for the CISA. The budget also allocates $13 billion for improved cyber defenses across government agencies.

MAGNET GOBLIN TARGETS PUBLICLY FACING SERVERS USING 1-DAY VULNERABILITIES

Magnet Goblin is a financially motivated threat group that rapidly exploits 1-day vulnerabilities in internet-facing services. They use an Ivanti VPN exploit discovered within a day of its release. Their arsenal includes NerbianRAT, WARPWIRE, MiniNerbian backdoors, and remote management tools. They have targeted Ivanti, Magento, Qlik Sense, and possibly Apache ActiveMQ in recent campaigns.

AWS LAUNCHES WAF TRAFFIC OVERVIEW DASHBOARDS

AWS has launched a new set of dashboards that provide near-real-time visualizations of Cloudwatch logs generated by AWS WAF. The dashboards visualize key WAF metrics such as bot detection, CAPTCHA solve rates, and the top 10 matched rules for each web ACL. The dashboards are enabled by default at no additional charge.

GOOGLE VULNERABILITY REWARD PROGRAM: 2023 YEAR IN REVIEW

Google paid out $10 million through its bug bounty programs in 2023. It has paid out $59 million since 2010.

AIRBNB IS BANNING INDOOR SECURITY CAMERAS INSIDE ITS LISTINGS

Indoor security cameras will be banned inside all Airbnb listings to protect customer privacy. Stricter regulations on outdoor cameras and noise decibel monitoring devices were also announced.

KALI NETHUNTER NOW SUPPORTS BAD BLUETOOTH HID ATTACKS TO INJECT KEYSTROKES WIRELESSLY

Kali Nethunter now supports performing bad bluetooth HID attacks.

TEENS ARE HAPPIER WHEN PHONE-FREE, SAYS RECENT PEW STUDY

95% of US teens have access to a smartphone. Three-quarters of them say they feel more peaceful when they’re without them. Yet, most teens do not limit their phone or social media usage. They believe smartphones facilitate creativity, hobbies, and academic success — which outweighs perceived harms.

AI JOBS IN MARKETING: BRANDS ARE REASSESSING ROLES TO BUILD OUT NEW CAPABILITIES

Brands are pushing the envelope to hire splashy AI leadership roles and prove to the market that they’re serious about AI. Within the next year, new roles on the rise will include ethicists, conversational marketing specialists with expertise in sophisticated chatbots, and data-informed strategists on the brand side.

HOW TO DESIGN WORLD-CLASS MARKETING EMAILS

This post contains 8 ways to improve your emails and make them world-class. These include using sender names with a personal touch, 7-word subject lines, and images to avoid color distortion. You should also A/B test all of the major elements in your emails to validate what works best with your own audience.

HOW TO PRIORITIZE YOUR MARKETING ROADMAP

Marketers are in a hurry to bring results, which makes it difficult to zoom out to the strategic foundations. This post contains a prioritization framework with 4 layers: product, strategy, systems, and surface-level actions. Each layer is dependent on the last, which forces you to start from the foundations and work outwards to the surface-level tactics. This ensures that the executed marketing tactics align with the foundational product and strategy.

META ANNOUNCES UPDATES TO ADVANTAGE+ AND SHOPPING ADS

Meta has announced new ads updates that primarily focus on retailers and those using its automated Advantage+ campaigns. Advantage+ creative optimizations can now automatically optimize video ads for viewing on Reels and dynamically create ad variations in order to personalize them to each user. The platform also offers new dynamic formats, including Reminder ads on Instagram, improved promo code ads, and ads with product tags.

‘TIKTOK PHOTOS’ SURFACES AS AN APP EXCLUSIVELY FOR SHARING PHOTOS

TikTok is reportedly developing a new photo-sharing app amidst potential US ban concerns. TikTok Photos is supposed to be a brand-new app focused solely on sharing photos, diverging from TikTok's short-form video format. Strings within the TikTok app for Android suggest that it aims to connect users who enjoy photo posts and will allow syncing between the two platforms. No official launch date has been announced.

IS NET PROMOTER SCORE THE OZEMPIC OF METRICS?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Ozempic both offer the illusion of progress, addictive simplicity, and vanity. NPS can tell you how many promoters or detractors you have, but often fails to reveal why customers feel that way. Instead of NPS, brands should invest in measuring Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Dollar Retention Rate (NDR). It’s also worthwhile to ensure that feedback mechanisms include rigorous and random sampling methods, as well as qualitative feedback.

HOW CHAMBERLAIN COFFEE IS ‘GROWING UP’ WITH ITS FOUNDER

Chamberlain Coffee, founded by influencer Emma Chamberlain, is evolving beyond its Gen Z base. It is maturing and expanding into new products like flavored matcha and ready-to-drink canned coffee, aiming to appeal to a broader demographic. The brand is venturing into retail spaces like Amazon, Walmart, and Whole Foods while strategically adjusting its brand tone and packaging for broader demographic appeal.

HOW LIVE MUSIC IS HELPING B2B BRAND STRIKE A NEW MARKETING CHORD

Today’s decision-makers skew younger and more female, with 45% under the age of 35 and over half being women. B2B brands like Cisco are leveraging live music festivals, such as BottleRock Napa Valley, to engage with more diverse audiences. Beyond captivating fans with its technology story, Cisco nurtured business relationships in its onsite suite, hosted clients and prospects, and partook in festival activations. Its story underscores the importance of emotional connections and in-person interactions at such live events for B2B brand engagement.

5 B2B BUYERS' BEHAVIORS IN 2024

This post highlights common B2B buyers’ behaviors and questions to consider when selling to customers.

PLAYABLE ADS DRIVE 20X MORE INSTALLS THAN BANNERS

Playable ads are more effective than banners for gaming apps.

WHAT WE’RE SEEING A WEEK INTO THE GOOGLE MARCH 2024 CORE AND SPAM UPDATES

A quick timeline of changes seen in the last week since March 5’s core and spam updates.

THE DAY SOFT DELETES CAUSED CHAOS

Soft deletes in databases, while seemingly convenient, can lead to unfortunate consequences due to their hidden complexity and potential for data integrity issues. This author recounts a severe incident where a change in soft delete handling during a migration resulted in allowing the selling of the same seat an unlimited number of times for a popular concert. It’s worth considering using history/audit tables for preserving deleted data instead of soft deletes in production systems.

WHAT IS INP AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Google introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a new Core Web Vital on March 12 to emphasize the importance of a website's overall responsiveness throughout a user's entire visit. INP measures the delay between users' interactions (clicks, taps, or keypresses) and visual feedback from websites. To understand and improve your website's INP score, utilize the Performance tab in Chrome DevTools, prioritize timely visual feedback, and optimize JavaScript execution.

MY FAVORITE ANIMATION TRICK: EXPONENTIAL SMOOTHING

Exponential smoothing is an animation technique that provides a smooth and responsive way to move objects towards their target positions. This blog demonstrates its use in UI elements and camera movement, showing its advantages over linear or easing-based animations. The mathematical basis of exponential smoothing is derived from differential equations, so it automatically handles varying time intervals and speed parameters.

40 YEARS OF PROGRAMMING

This essay reflects over a four-decade career in software development. To be a successful software engineer, one must communicate and collaborate well. While "getting things done" is important, developers must also consider the long-term maintenance costs of their work. Readers should find their own best practices for productive software engineering while also remembering to take care of themselves.

NERVOUS ABOUT Q&AS? 7 ESSENTIAL TIPS TO ANSWER CONFIDENTLY

While feeling nervous when asked questions under pressure is normal, it can hinder your ability to respond with the best possible answer. To overcome this, adjust your mindset, embrace silence, and strategically clarify the question before answering. If the question is complex, provide a brief answer and offer a follow-up discussion. For complaints, focus on understanding the underlying concerns rather than getting defensive.

MENTORSHIP’S ROLE IN MY STAFF PROMOTION

This article offers two stories, with advice, on how mentorship was key to a Meta engineer’s promotion to staff engineer. One story focuses on explicit mentorship, where they regularly checked in with someone to get advice. The other story focuses on implicit mentorship, where they worked with someone who had the skills they wanted to develop.

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BEBOP

Bebop is a fast data interchange format. In benchmarks, it is 100 times faster than Protocol Buffers and 1000 times faster than JSON. Bebop offers the binary serialization benefits of Protocol Buffers with a better developer experience.

ASTRO 4.5

Astro 4.5 introduces a new Dev Audit UI that provides in-browser guidance for improving site performance and accessibility. This release also offers enhanced View Transitions functionality, multi-CDN asset prefixing for optimized content delivery, and more.

WINTERJS

WinterJS is a fast JavaScript server that runs Service Workers scripts. It is able to handle up to 100,000 requests per second on a single laptop.

THE “10X ENGINEER:" 50 YEARS AGO AND NOW

The book "Mythical Man Month,” written 50 years ago, explores the concept of the "10x engineer." Its author theorizes that building a team of supporting roles around a highly productive chief programmer could maximize output. Nowadays, advanced tooling eliminates the need for such hierarchical team structures and much of the proposed support team.

BUILDING META’S GENAI INFRASTRUCTURE

Meta recently built two large-scale AI clusters, each containing over 24,000 GPUs, to power its current and future AI models. Built with a focus on researcher experience and productivity, these clusters feature high-performance networks, powerful storage solutions, and the latest NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Meta is optimizing these clusters to handle large complex models and is scaling its infrastructure to include hundreds of thousands of GPUs by the end of 2024.

THE DIGITAL MARKETS ACT IS IN FORCE! WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is now in effect. Companies like Apple, Google, and Meta must ensure that their designated core platform services comply with the DMA or face substantial fines. Key changes required by the DMA include end of browser engine restrictions, third-party app store access, web app installation fairness, and the respecting of user choice in chosen default browsers.