>> Presenter: From downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA North America 2018. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco with RSA North America 2018 40,000 plus professionals talking about security, enterprise security. It's a growing field, it's getting baked into everything. There's a whole lot of reasons that this needs to be better and more integrated into everything that we do, as opposed to just kind of a slap on at the end. And, who better to have on, who's investing at the cutting edge, keeping an eye on the startups than Sean Cunningham, our next guest. He's a managing director ForgePoint Capital, the newly named, so welcome to ForgePoint Capital, I guess. (Sean laughs) >> Thanks, Jeff, we're pretty excited about it. So, we were branded Trident Capital Cybersecurity. We're a 300 million dollar cybersecurity only fund, we closed the fund about a year and a half ago. We've invested in a dozen companies, and we decided that now is a great time to rebrand ForgePoint really tells more about what we're doing, we're forging ahead with our Series A, Series B funded companies, as well as a few growth equity. So, it made a lot of sense, but we're pretty excited about the market, and obviously RSA, with 1700 cybersecurity companies makes it interesting. >> Right, so you've been at this for a while. I wonder if you can speak to some of the macro trends as we've seen the growth of cloud, the growth of IoT will soon be more industrial IoT, enabled by 5G. We've got all these automated systems and financial services trading, and ad tech that we're going to see more and more of that automated transaction happening. You've got APIs and everything's connected to everything else to enable my application. So, really really exciting, and huge, growing threat surface if you will, but at the same, these are the technologies that are driving forward. So, what are you seeing from your, seat at the table some of the newer, more innovative startups? >> Jeff, I think you should probably tell me. You have all the answers there. >> I talked to a lot of smart people, that's the benefit of the job. >> I think the only two buzzwords you left off was Bitcoin and fraudulent payments. >> Oh, we can work a little blockchain in if you want. >> Yeah, but it is absolutely a bit of an interesting environment. I've been doing it since 2000 with Intel Capital for 15 years, but what's really changed, what hasn't changed is the fact that it's all about the hackers are able to monetize this. So, that's not going away. The biggest change are the, I guess, overt nation state attacks. So, between all of those things, the drivers are just continuing to force cybersecurity to become better and better. And, that's why the innovative startups are really, you're seeing these 1700, because the legacy companies can't fix these problems. And, you know, you talk about all these different paths for hackers to get in. It's absolutely the case and we are really big on areas, as you mentioned Jeff, the automation. It has to be about automating. It has to be about having a real solution for a real problem. You know, you look at, let's say 1500 of these security startups, a lot of them are about technology for the sake of technology. So, we're pretty excited about a couple of areas. One, is application security. If you think about the Equifax hack, you know, it's as simple as getting into the website and being able to hack into all of the PII data if you will. And, we've invested in a company called Prevoty and what they do is they make it easy for the application security folks to meet with the DevOps folks and inject the software into these applications. The reason why that's really interesting is, if you think about how long it takes for the DevOps guys to get all their new updates out, through that whole cycle, when you could automate that process and reduce that time to market, that's what it's really all about. >> So, what's your take on GDPR. You know, it's past a little while ago, the enforcement comes into place next month. It's weird what's going on with Facebook right now. I don't ever hear GDPR in the conversation of what's going on, and yet, it's just around the corner and it seems like it would be part of that conversation. DC is just king of a Y2K moment, where there's a lot of buzz and the date hits and we get past it and then we kind of move on with our lives, or is this really a fundamental shift in the way that companies are going to have to manage their data? >> Well, I can show you my scars from investigating compliance companies. I think the winners in that space, from a business standpoint are going to be the consultant companies, initially and at some point then, the legacy guys are going to be also involved, as well as some of the startups. But, clearly, until you see some of the large penalties happen, there's not going to be a lot of movement. There's going to be a lot of hand waving and consulting firms are trying to figure out what's your problem, how do we solve it. So, you're going to see, I'm sure, around the floor a lot of GDLP stuff, but we're being very cautious about where we invest there because, as you say, Y2K and a lot of this is going to be a lot fud. The legacy guys are going to say, oh we can handle that. Same as they did with cloud. Look how long it's taking cloud to get adopted, my God. I mean-- >> Right. >> GDRP is a big piece of that. We did investments in that space, around CASB, it's called. And, we invested in a company called Prelert. It had great traction, but then it just kind of topped out. So, it's going to be investable space and there's going to be a lot of money dumped in there because it's, you know, the Lemming effect. All VCs are going to follow that. >> Right. >> We'll see what happens. >> And then on the cloud, you know, with the growth of public cloud with Amazon and Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and they've got significant resources that they're investing into the security of their clouds and their infrastructure. And, yet, we still hear things happen all the time where there's some breach because somebody forgot to turn a switch from green to blue, or whatever. How did the startups, you know, kind of find their path within these huge public cloud spaces to find a vector that they can concentrate on, that's not already covered by some of these massive investments that the big public cloud people are making? >> Yeah, I think some of the, you know you point something out, I mean we got to think about cloud, you think about the public cloud, you think of private cloud and hybrid model and so on. I think that's really where things are going to to be for a while. The big guys, the big companies, enterprises are not putting a lot of their crown jewels out in the public clouds, yet. And, so the private clouds are equally important to them. And, so they have to be secured. And, the public cloud, you know, there's definitely they have some good security, but they quietly are implementing security from innovative companies also. They're not as public about it because they want to have they're already secure, so don't worry about me, but there's a lot of opportunity there. >> Okay, and then when CIOs are talking about security and thinking about security, ultimately they cannot be 100 percent secure, right, it's just you cannot be. >> It's called job security. >> Yeah, job security for us, right. But, I was thinking of this kind of as an insurance model. At some point, you get kind of the law of diminishing returns and you got to start making business trade-offs for the investment. How are these people thinking about this, at the same time, seeing their competitors and neighbors showing up on the cover of the Wall Street Journal breach after breach after breach? What's the right balance? How should they be thinking about managing risk, and thinking of a risk problem as opposed to kind of a castle problem? >> Yeah, and that's the biggest problem with CIOs and CSOs right now. It's all about what's good enough. Where do I reach that threshold? And, so there is definitely buyer fatigue. And, I think it's a matter, there are companies out there that look at the risk profile and are actually giving ratings of, what is your environment look like. We just invested in a spin out from, we helped spin out a company called CyberCube out of Symantec, and it's insurance. And, they're looking at, from a cyber insurance perspective, of what's your risk profile within your organization and selling and that data from Symantec as well as the data they have and going back to the insurance, the under buyer and saying, hey, we can show you the risk profile of this company and you can properly price your cyber insurance now. We all know how large the cyber insurance market is, so there's a lot of opportunities in that space to really look at the risk factors. >> Alright, well before I let you go, to go visit all the 117 startups, which will be looking for your cheque, I'm sure. >> Human ATM. >> What is one or two things that you think about in some of the more progressive startups that you talk about that still hasn't kind of hit the public eye yet. That they should be thinking about, or that we're going to be talking about in a couple years that's still kind of below the radar? >> Yeah, you know, if I told you then everyone else would be-- >> That's true. >> So, I have to be a little careful. You know, I think the interesting thing is, you know, a bit of a contrarian view. Is, if you think about consumer space, people don't really want to invest. Investors don't want to put money in the consumer, but you think about Symantec again, LifeLock. Identity protection, 2.3 billion dollars Symantec paid to get LifeLock. That's a lot of money. But, if you think about five years ago, how many consumers would pull out their Visa card to buy security. So, we think that there's really a potential opportunity on the consumer side. Now, AV is pretty well scorched earth. A lot of places, a lot of these endpoint things are scorched earth, but consumer might be an interesting place to be able to take these enterprise applications and, what I call, the consumerization of security, and take some of those interesting application and solutions and bring them down to the consumer in a bundle type of environment. >> Yeah, well certainly with all the stuff going on with Facebook now, people's kind of reawakening at the consumer level of what's really happening would certainly be fuel for that fire. >> We have an investment in a company called IDEXPERTS, which does breach remediation and our goal right now is we're continuing to add products from that space to be able to give the consumers a very robust offering. >> Alright, Sean, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day from prospecting. >> Yeah, pleasure. >> Over on the floor, he's Sean Cunningham, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from RSA North America 2018 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)