The Economy

Cybersecurity / The Economy — No Comments
26
Jul 22

How is Cybersecurity Spending Changing?

I’ve been speaking to a lot of CISOs and founders of cybersecurity companies, and thus far the current macro environment doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. Cybersecurity budgets appear to remain healthy and founders aren’t seeing a slow down in purchasing.

This is probably due to the fact that attackers aren’t going to be hacking less due to a recession and as such companies can’t afford to cut budgets. I would expect that some amount of spending will be put off for new large projects, think replacing your current endpoint solution, but lower cost startups might actually be gaining share because of belt tightening.

Either way, it’s something that I’m keeping a close eye on.

If you’re going to be in Vegas for the BlackHat cybersecurity conference or the annual DefCon hackers conference drop me a line, I’d love to meet up with you. You can reach me at: lucas@lyticalventures.com or @lucasnelson on Twitter.

The Economy — No Comments
18
Aug 08

The ‘Generation that Changed Everything’ needs to change retirement expectations

You’ve probably seen an ad  like this:  A group of gray haired boomers laugh and joke as they grab their surf boards, in the background a 60’s counter culture song plays. The voice over talks about how it was a generation that ‘changed everything.’

I love my parents, but I can’t help but feel a bit let down by their generation. As they prepare to retire we have a crises in social security and Medicare, and this is a crises that they caused. They are the highest earners, they have been in power for the past 16 years (since Clinton) and not only have they not addressed the issue, but they made it appreciably worse.
Us_savings_rate_2

    This is the US Savings rate, as the boomer’s become the heads of household’s the savings rate drops. It recently hit 0%.

I’m sure this isn’t all their fault, but given that we are expected to carry the social security burden it would be really nice if they took a real stab at fixing the problem before they retired, because if they don’t then the leave the problem up to a later generation. And it seems pretty unfair to leave the issue to a new group who either has to break the promises implicit in the system, or shoulder the burden for a series of decisions they had no part in making. Mom, Dad: I love you both, but talk to your surfing buddies will ya?