In the late 2010s, startups were advised to raise substantial venture capital for fixed costs like software and sales, but this paradigm is shifting towards variable costs and asset-light models, driven by the commoditization of software and advancements in generative AI. This transformation is challenging traditional venture capital models, creating new opportunities for business developers and hyperscale cloud providers in a more variable cost-driven software industry.
The role of a product marketer doesn’t get a lot of airtime in the SaaS space. This article unpacks what this strategic role is all about and why you should consider making them the first marketing hire at your startup.
This article covers insights from Doug Adamic (CRO of Brex & previous CRO of Concur) about revenue growth and efficiency at venture-backed companies, as well as a general pulse check on the state of venture-backed startups.
It seems both big and small tech companies are leaning into measuring developer productivity. Here’s a deep dive on 17 tech companies, big and small, and how they measure this performance metric.
2024.01.17·
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com·20 min read·TLDR Founders
Is building CSV import functionality really the best use of your team's time? Companies like Ramp, Scale AI, and Vanta use Oneschema to launch a seamless CSV import experience in just a few days. Discover
“66% of us are starting the year burnt out” - if true, that’s worrying. Here are some suggestions for you, the founder, on how you can take more things off your plate, enabling you to recharge better.
When everything in the startup media looks golden, it’s easy to forget that success is often the result of an iterative series of failures. Society is quick to point out weird ideas and call them ugly, but we shouldn’t. Each weird idea, regardless of its ultimate success or failure, introduces new thinking into the world. We should embrace experiments and weird ideas, particularly as founders.
Revolut, a leading Fintech company, experienced hyper-growth through word-of-mouth and referral marketing. It constituted 65-70% of its traffic. The company’s overall marketing strategy was centered around its product. It aimed to provide something so good that customers would do the marketing for them. It used targeted referral campaigns to drive user acquisition and feature adoption. The campaigns included unique reward systems, incentives, and gamification.
Twitter’s former CTO and interim CEO Parag Agrawal has launched his own AI startups. They’ve received funding from some big-name VCs like Khosla Ventures.
The author, reflecting on a $130M acquisition, advises founders to actively understand mergers and acquisitions (M&A), build relationships with potential acquirers, and carefully negotiate deals.
In this recorded talk: speakers Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO at Hyperproof [5], and Dr. Rebecca Wynn, Global Chief Security Strategist and CISO at Click Solutions group, discuss: → Valid business use cases for generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
Most internet-facing SonicWall firewalls are unpatched for two high-severity vulnerabilities, allowing remote DoS and potentially RCE without authentication. CVE-2022-22274 and CVE-2023-0656 stem from code reuse issues. Patches were released in 2022 and 2023, but over 178,000 devices remain vulnerable. Exploitation can repeatedly crash devices, disrupting operations.
A security researcher discovered an unprotected database belonging to a school security company, Raptor Technologies. The 827GB database contains four million records that include student health information, court protection orders, school layouts, school security information, and background checks. Raptor Technologies has secured the database and reports that it has no evidence that the database was accessed by anyone else.
Trend Micro reports that a Windows Defender SmartScreen vulnerability that was patched in the November 2023 Patch Tuesday is being actively exploited in a campaign to drop the Phemedrone malware. The campaign involves using a specially crafted internet shortcut file to bypass SmartScreen, download a control panel item file from the attacker’s C2, and execute the loader, which establishes persistence and runs the malware. The Phemedrone info-stealer targets browsers, crypto wallets, Discord credentials, files, FTP connection info, system info, Steam, and Telegram.
This blog post goes through what LLM attacks are and shares examples of how to execute them. Web LLM attacks can retrieve protected data, trigger harmful actions via APIs like SQL injection, and attack systems querying the model. It resembles exploiting SSRF vulnerabilities - abusing a server-side system to attack components not directly accessible.
This blog post walks through how to create a stealthy arbitrary code execution attack on macOS. The author does this by seeking execution from memory without documented functions using just RtlMoveMemory and DispCallFunc to minimize traces.
The Sysdig Threat Research Team discovered a payload that utilizes the onbeforetoggle HTML attribute to bypass the AWS WAF’s Managed Rules’ protection. This post details how they built a fuzzer to fuzz for XSS payloads against the AWS WAF and details the bypass that they discovered. The vulnerability was patched by AWS after it was reported.
seCureLI is a tool that scans your local repo for secrets before you commit code to a remote repository, installs linters based on the code of your project to support security and coding best practices, and configures all the hooks needed so you don’t have to.
SOPS is an editor of encrypted files that has a wide range of supported formats and can encrypt using AWS, GCP, Azure, Vault, age, and PGP. SOPS exposes both an editor and a decryptor package.
The now inactive Inferno Drainer scam created over 16,000 malicious domains from 2022-2023 to phish cryptocurrency wallet credentials using high-quality phishing pages spoofing Web3 protocols. It scammed over 137,000 victims and stole $87 million. Inferno Drainer offered its scam-as-a-service malware to affiliates for 20% of earnings. It spoofed 100+ crypto brands via phishing sites on the 16,000+ domains.
Mandiant posts about the CLINKSINK Drainer Campaign that was executed after its X account was hacked. Mandiant notes that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Solana cryptocurrency assets have been stolen in recent CLINKSINK drainer campaigns. These campaigns involve the use of social media and chat applications to distribute cryptocurrency-themed phishing pages, which trick victims into connecting their wallets and approving fraudulent transactions.
The European Central Bank is planning to conduct its first cyber resilience stress tests on 109 supervised banks to assess their ability to respond to and recover from a cyber attack. The tests will simulate a scenario where a cyber attack disrupts the banks' daily operations, and the banks will be evaluated on their response and recovery measures.
Cloudflare published its DDoS Threat Report for Q4 2023, which observed a 61,839% increase in DDoS attacks targeting environmental services in 2023. The most targeted industries were cryptocurrency, gaming and gambling, and telecommunications.
HelloFresh, a recipe kit delivery service, has been fined £140,000 by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for sending 80 million spam messages to customers without proper consent.
The connected TV ad industry continues to rely on the IP address for tracking viewers and connecting CTV audiences with other devices in the household. However, this type of household-level tracking appears to fall into a legal gray area when it comes to children’s privacy law. This article includes a 10-minute-long video interview with experts in privacy law, ad tech, children’s media, and CTV.
Google is continuing its layoffs, impacting a few hundred roles globally in its advertising sales team. The Large Customer Sales unit, a team that sells ads to large businesses, is expected to bear the brunt. The leaked memo does not mention it, but there are speculations that the layoff is partly due to generative AI taking over some activities previously performed by these employees.
Repeated exposure to the same online ad can quickly lead to annoyance. There’s a 40% chance of putting off customers after just 3 repetitions. This article recommends capping general advertising at 3 times per person and up to 6 times for those already interested in the product. It also suggests using static images, changing creatives, and avoiding animations to increase ad tolerance.
A deep dive into 14 research-backed subject line split testing ideas to enhance email open rates. Suggestions cover personalization, urgency, length, benefits specificity, and content type indication. It also recommends tracking conversion rates alongside open rates and tailoring tactics based on industry and audience demographics.
This article covers 35 ChatGPT prompts to get more out of your email campaigns. It outlines how to structure your prompt to include roleplay or emulate an expert, communicate the exact product you want to promote, and articulate the tactical recommendation you want. The sample prompts cover flash sales, product launches, drip campaigns, and more.
Google Ads appears to be slowly releasing a feature that lets you add three campaign-level headlines and two campaign-level descriptions. You can also schedule the headlines and descriptions to run at certain times or pin them in specific positions. This can be useful during a sale period.
Most brands make mistakes when identifying their target audience and the segments within it. This framework helps you organize your overall audience by segment, persona, buyer, and user. Working through this can be a helpful exercise to understand who to target as well as identify the best buying process for them.
Every business can be distilled into a simple equation. Figuring out this equation gives you a map for understanding which metrics you need to track and what factors drive the growth of your business. This post walks through how to identify your business’s formula and how to use it to identify the lever(s) that drives the most impact. This is also a valuable basis for building a full-fledged growth model.
Podcasting remains a rapidly growing digital channel despite mixed headlines in 2023. U.S. ad revenues grew 115% from 2020 to 2022. While podcasts face challenges in revenue generation, the programmatic share of podcast revenue doubled to 11% in 2023. This offers marketers opportunities to expand direct relationships and reach broader audiences. Embracing programmatic strategies, such as dynamic ad insertion and brand-building campaigns, has proven successful for audio streaming networks like SiriusXM Media.
Despite facing financial challenges and emotional distress, Gen Zs exhibit heavy luxury spending, emphasizing the need for a new approach to financial well-being.
Explore various naming strategies based on the top 100 App Store apps. Tactics are split between creative and practical including play on words, paying tribute, easy-to-remember options, and abbreviations.
Exploring React Server Components (RSCs)? This new server-first paradigm [5] is tricky — but it can help you significantly improve developer experience and app performance. Join Cloudflare’s free, half-day workshop [5] to understand RSCs work behind-the-scenes, and how you can use them in your day-to-day dev work. You’ll also gain insight into new deployment patterns made possible by innovations in the platform space.
Tech companies like Google and LinkedIn measure developer productivity in different ways. Common metrics in the industry that are commonly tracked as proxies for productivity are ease of delivery, experiment velocity, and the stability of services and apps. However, quantitative metrics alone can’t describe the full picture. Teams should start with defining specific goals and problems first, then pick the right quantitative and qualitative metrics for those goals.