Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference kicked off yesterday in Park City, Utah, and the speakers certainly had plenty to share. But I have to start with Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport because—as I mentioned yesterday—Alphabet is reportedly close to buying his company for a whopping $23 billion, which would be a record for the Google owner.
Rappaport understandably didn’t have much to say about that. “As you can imagine, I can share very little if at all,” he told my colleague Allie Garfinkle. Wiz investor Philip Clark, of Thrive Capital, was marginally more forthcoming, but not much: “Every time we’ve made an investment, it’s with the expectation that we’re going to be long-term holders, and if we’re surprised to the upside in the interim, no-one’s going to complain.”
Wiz specializes in cloud security for enterprise customers. According to experts quoted in a Reuters article today, the company’s timing was very good—it was launched in early 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, necessitating more reliance on the cloud than ever before. Rappaport touched on that subject yesterday, describing the moment he and his cofounders left Microsoft (which had bought their previous startup, Adallom, in 2015).
“I was in the mothership—truly I loved Microsoft—I had a great job, great impact on security, and decided to leave with the founders I have,” said Rappaport. “Nobody picked up the phone, nobody answered us. In the first couple of months, it felt like the worst timing ever to start a company. In hindsight…if you pinpoint a time in history, probably March 2020, that’s the time to start a cloud security [company].”
You can read more about Rappaport’s call for greater consolidation in the cybersecurity market here. And with that, here are a couple more quotes from Day One:
“In the future, private wealth managers, private bankers, investment advisers—those will all be AI-enabled. And I think that’s going to be a hugely transformative force and it will lead to more people being able to access these services that otherwise would be reserved for high net worth individuals.”
—Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who also told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that crypto would provide the “next transition” for financial services due to low infrastructural costs and the ability to cut out intermediaries.
“We’re on a path to what’s called functional safety, so in the next 18 months or so we’ll be able to incorporate all the things that are needed in order to be able to operate near humans.”
—Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson, whose company makes a humanoid logistics-center robot called Digit that currently needs to be fenced off from human colleagues due to safety concerns (and that made an onstage appearance yesterday). Johnson also sang the praises of generative AI, saying it made Agility’s job easier:
“The other day we threw a bunch of trash on the floor, different kinds of trash, and we put all the bins behind Digit…and we just gave it one command: ‘Digit, clean up this trash.’ And Digit scans the room, picks up the paper, puts it in the recycle [bin], picks up some cardboard, does the same thing—goes and picks up some bubble wrap and puts it in the trash. And we all went, ‘Ugh, mistake,’ but it turns out bubble wrap is not recyclable. So Digit, with the power of ChatGPT underneath, was able to make that decision. So now we don’t need to code all of that. With ChatGPT and other LLMs we have the ability to just give Digit a direction.”
More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Labels vs. Verizon. The big record labels have sued Verizon for knowingly providing “its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates, who it knows repeatedly use that service to infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights.” The damages they’re after could add up to over $2.6 billion. As The Register notes, this case is a real blast from the past, as rights-holders used to regularly go after internet service providers for their users’ infractions. Here, labels such as Sony and Universal claim that Verizon didn’t properly handle their complaints about users’ peer-to-peer file sharing.
Disney AI-activist hack. A hacktivist group called Nullbulge, which claims to be incensed at Disney’s “approach to AI” and protective of artists’ rights, has hacked the entertainment giant. Disney has acknowledged the attack but hasn’t confirmed Nullbulge’s claim to have taken over a terabyte of data, including internal communications, ad campaigns, and various other things. According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney’s Slack system was the vector for the attack.
Intel China alarm. Intel’s VC arm is a prolific investor in Chinese AI and chip startups, with stakes in 43 of them, according to the Financial Times. The paper quotes a “person familiar with the Biden administration’s thinking” as saying Intel’s investments were “poster children that helped build consensus” around new rules banning U.S. investment in Chinese tech that could have military purposes. The rules could force Intel to divest some of its interests.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
$512 million
—The sum that Google offered European cloud firms to not settle their long-running antitrust complaint against Microsoft, according to Bloomberg. It didn’t work.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
What you need to know about J.D. Vance’s VC career, by Allie Garfinkle
Elon Musk blames robotaxi delay on ‘important design change’, but he claims to have a surprise up his sleeve, by Christiaan Hetzner
Tesla is looking to hire 800 new employees 3 months after Elon Musk ordered mass firings of thousands, by Bloomberg
Trump Media stock soars 50% after assassination attempt as election victory looks more likely, by Seamus Webster
Salesforce slashes hundreds more jobs, rattling investors, by Bloomberg
Bosses and employees have wildly different expectations about how much time they can save with AI, by Ryan Hogg
Nokia CEO: Europe shouldn’t be afraid to back its innovation champions, by Pekka Lundmark (Commentary)
BEFORE YOU GO
Shooter’s phone. The FBI seems to have gained access to the phone of Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, just a couple days after his death. It’s still not clear what they found there, but, as The Verge reports, the speed with which the authorities cracked the device shows how advanced phone-hacking tools have become. It’s certainly a far cry from the situation in 2015, when the Feds took months to break into the iPhone of San Bernardino, Calif. shooter Syed Farook.
