The Future of AI Software Security | Ep. 39

There is this saying in, uh, uh, security circles that in order to survive a bear attack, you don't need to outrun the bear, but you need to outrun the person running next to you. That's the way that the business has been operating for a very long time. But with AI, you can think about the fact that there isn't just going to be one bear, there's gonna be a thousand AI bears.

That's terrible.

[chuckles] Like, so we're really trying to secure the world's software from AI bears, really. [upbeat music]

Today, I'm here with Daniele Perito, who co-founded Faire. Before that, you were a founding team member at Cash App at Square, and you also ran data and security there. And then most recently, you've now become the founder of Depthfirst, which is an awesome AI security company. Really excited to be doing this, uh, podcast with you today.

Thank you for having me.

I want to start by learning about Faire and sort of like, what your experience was like there, but maybe if you could take us back to sort of the founding insight or what sort of led to the creation of the company.

I would say that Faire was probably a little bit of a contrarian bet. Uh, people at the time didn't think that brick-and-mortar retail was this place where there was gonna be a lot of growth, like Faire proved. But, uh, at the time, Max, Marcelo, and I were talking about ideas on companies to start together with Geoff Golitzen as well, and, uh, Max was introducing a high-end umbrella from the-- from New Zealand to the US market. He was seeing, uh... That was a side gig. You know, he was working at Square, but he had a little bit of a side gig, and he, he was seeing how getting sales on Amazon was extremely hard. Getting into a Nordstrom or a Walmart was also extremely hard, and working with the hundreds of thousands or millions of retailers was just impossible because there were, like, many, many regional sales reps and things like that.

Mm.

So we thought that there had to be a better way, and then from Square, we knew that sort of taking risk on behalf of your customers w- it was always a good way to create value because, you know, Square is in the risk management business, in a sense, and we had learned that there. So we decided to give retailers the ability to order and not have to pay for sixty days and be able to return anything that they don't like. So... And taking the discovery risk off of their balance sheet, and then not even asking brands to offer that value prop, but us sort of trying to use technology to offer that value prop. So that was a big insight-

Yeah

... in starting Faire.

Did it go sort of the way you expected from the beginning? Like, how linear was it from, like, that concept to just, like, the company, you know, taking off and going the way that it ended up going?