Preclusio uses machine learning to comply with GDPR, other privacy regulations

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As privacy regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act proliferate, more startups are looking to help companies comply. Enter Preclusio, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2019 class, which has developed a machine learning-fueled solution to help companies adhere to these privacy regulations.

“We have a platform that is deployed on-prem in our customer’s environment, and helps them identify what data they’re collecting, how they’re using it, where it’s being stored and how it should be protected. We help companies put together this broad view of their data, and then we continuously monitor their data infrastructure to ensure that this data continues to be protected,” company co-founder and CEO Heather Wade told TechCrunch.

She says that the company made a deliberate decision to keep the solution on-prem. “We really believe in giving our clients control over their data. We don’t want to be just another third-party SaaS vendor that you have to ship your data to,” Wade explained.

That said, customers can run it wherever they wish, whether that’s on-prem or in the cloud in Azure or AWS. Regardless of where it’s stored, the idea is to give customers direct control over their own data. “We are really trying to alert our customers to threats or to potential privacy exceptions that are occurring in their environment in real time, and being in their environment is really the best way to facilitate this,” she said.

The product works by getting read-only access to the data, then begins to identify sensitive data in an automated fashion using machine learning. “Our product automatically looks at the schema and samples of the data, and uses machine learning to identify common protected data,” she said. Once that process is completed, a privacy compliance team can review the findings and adjust these classifications as needed.

Wade, who started the company in March, says the idea formed at previous positions where she was responsible for implementing privacy policies and found there weren’t adequate solutions on the market to help. “I had to face the challenges first-hand of dealing with privacy and compliance and seeing how resources were really taken away from our engineering teams and having to allocate these resources to solving these problems internally, especially early on when GDPR was first passed, and there really were not that many tools available in the market,” she said.

Interestingly Wade’s co-founder is her husband, John. She says they deal with the intensity of being married and startup founders by sticking to their areas of expertise. He’s the marketing person and she’s the technical one.

She says they applied to Y Combinator because they wanted to grow quickly, and that timing is important with more privacy laws coming online soon. She has been impressed with the generosity of the community in helping them reach their goals. “It’s almost indescribable how generous and helpful other folks who’ve been through the YC program are to the incoming batches, and they really do have that spirit of paying it forward,” she said.

Adobe’s Amit Ahuja will be talking customer experience at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise

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As companies collect increasingly large amounts of data about customers, the end game is about improving the customer experience. It’s a term we’re hearing a lot of these days, and we are going to be discussing that very topic with Amit Ahuja, Adobe’s vice president of ecosystem development, next month at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco. Grab your early-bird tickets right now — $100 savings ends today!

Customer experience covers a broad array of enterprise software and includes data collection, analytics and software. Adobe deals with all of this, including the Adobe Experience Platform for data collection, Adobe Analytics for visualization and understanding and Adobe Experience Cloud for building applications.

The idea is to begin to build an understanding of your customers through the various interactions you have with them, and then build applications to give them a positive experience. There is a lot of talk about “delighting” customers, but it’s really about using the digital realm to help them achieve what they want as efficiently as possible, whatever that means to your business.

Ahuja will be joining TechCrunch’s editors, along with Qualtrics chief experience officer Julie Larson-Green and Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt to discuss the finer points of what it means to build a customer experience, and how software can help drive that.

Ahuja has been with Adobe since 2005 when he joined as part of the $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition. His primary role today involves building and managing strategic partnerships and initiatives. Prior to this, he was the head of Emerging Businesses and the GM of Adobe’s Data Management Platform business, which focuses on advertisers. He also spent seven years in Adobe’s Corporate Development Group, where he helped complete the acquisitions of Omniture, Scene7, Efficient Frontier, Demdex and Auditude.

Amit will be joining us on September 5 in San Francisco, along with some of the biggest influencers in enterprise, including Bill McDermott from SAP, Scott Farquhar from Atlassian, Aparna Sinha from Google, Wendy Nather from Duo Security, Aaron Levie from Box and Andrew Ng from Landing AI.

Early-bird savings end today, August 9. Book your tickets today and you’ll save $100 before prices go up.

Bringing a group? Book our 4+ group tickets and you’ll save 20% on the early-bird rate. Bring the whole squad here.

Announcing the agenda for TC Sessions: Enterprise | San Francisco, September 5

iNSYNQ Ransom Attack Began With Phishing Email

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A ransomware outbreak that hit QuickBooks cloud hosting firm iNSYNQ in mid-July appears to have started with an email phishing attack that snared an employee working in sales for the company, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. It also looks like the intruders spent roughly ten days rooting around iNSYNQ’s internal network to properly stage things before unleashing the ransomware. iNSYNQ ultimately declined to pay the ransom demand, and it is still working to completely restore customer access to files.

Some of this detail came in a virtual “town hall” meeting held August 8, in which iNSYNQ chief executive Elliot Luchansky briefed customers on how it all went down, and what the company is doing to prevent such outages in the future.

A great many iNSYNQ’s customers are accountants, and when the company took its network offline on July 16 in response to the ransomware outbreak, some of those customers took to social media to complain that iNSYNQ was stonewalling them.

“We could definitely have been better prepared, and it’s totally unacceptable,” Luchansky told customers. “I take full responsibility for this. People waiting ridiculous amounts of time for a response is unacceptable.”

By way of explaining iNSYNQ’s initial reluctance to share information about the particulars of the attack early on, Luchansky told customers the company had to assume the intruders were watching and listening to everything iNSYNQ was doing to recover operations and data in the wake of the ransomware outbreak.

“That was done strategically for a good reason,” he said. “There were human beings involved with [carrying out] this attack in real time, and we had to assume they were monitoring everything we could say. And that posed risks based on what we did say publicly while the ransom negotiations were going on. It could have been used in a way that would have exposed customers even more. That put us in a really tough bind, because transparency is something we take very seriously. But we decided it was in our customers’ best interests to not do that.”

A paid ad that comes up prominently when one searches for “insynq” in Google.

Luchansky did not say how much the intruders were demanding, but he mentioned two key factors that informed the company’s decision not to pay up.

“It was a very substantial amount, but we had the money wired and were ready to pay it in cryptocurrency in the case that it made sense to do so,” he told customers. “But we also understood [that paying] would put a target on our heads in the future, and even if we actually received the decryption key, that wasn’t really the main issue here. Because of the quick reaction we had, we were able to contain the encryption part” to roughly 50 percent of customer systems, he said.

Luchansky said the intruders seeded its internal network with MegaCortex, a potent new ransomware strain first spotted just a couple of months ago that is being used in targeted attacks on enterprises. He said the attack appears to have been carefully planned out in advance and executed “with human intervention all the way through.”

“They decided they were coming after us,” he said. “It’s one thing to prepare for these sorts of events but it’s an entirely different experience to deal with first hand.”

According to an analysis of MegaCortex published this week by Accenture iDefense, the crooks behind this ransomware strain are targeting businesses — not home users — and demanding ransom payments in the range of two to 600 bitcoins, which is roughly $20,000 to $5.8 million.

“We are working for profit,” reads the ransom note left behind by the latest version of MegaCortex. “The core of this criminal business is to give back your valuable data in the original form (for ransom of course).”

A portion of the ransom note left behind by the latest version of MegaCortex. Image: Accenture iDefense.

Luchansky did not mention in the town hall meeting exactly when the initial phishing attack was thought to have occurred, noting that iNSYNQ is still working with California-based CrowdStrike to gain a more complete picture of the attack.

But Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security, showed KrebsOnSecurity information obtained from monitoring dark web communications which suggested the problem started on July 6, after an employee in iNSYNQ’s sales division fell for a targeted phishing email.

“This shows that even after the initial infection, if companies act promptly they can still detect and stop the ransomware,” Holden said. “For these infections hackers take sometimes days, weeks, or even months to encrypt your data.”

iNSYNQ did not respond to requests for comment on Hold Security’s findings.

Asked whether the company had backups of customer data and — if so — why iNSYNQ decided not to restore from those, Luchansky said there were backups but that some of those were also infected.

“The backup system is backing up the primary system, and that by definition entails some level of integration,” Luchansky explained. “The way our system was architected, the malware had spread into the backups as well, at least a little bit. So [by] just turning the backups back on, there was a good chance the the virus would then start to spread through the backup system more. So we had to treat the backups similarly to how we were treating the primary systems.”

Luchansky said their backup system has since been overhauled, and that if a similar attack happened in the future it would take days instead of weeks to recover. However, he declined to get into specifics about exactly what had changed, which is too bad because in every ransomware attack story I’ve written this seems to be the detail most readers are interested in and arguing about.

The CEO added that iNSYNQ also will be partnering with a company that helps firms detect and block targeted phishing attacks, and that it envisioned being able to offer this to its customers at a discounted rate. It wasn’t clear from Luchansky’s responses to questions whether the cloud hosting firm was also considering any kind of employee anti-phishing education and/or testing service.

Luchansky said iNSYNQ was about to restore access to more than 90 percent of customer files by Aug. 2 — roughly two weeks after the ransomware outbreak — and that the company would be offering customers a two month credit as a result of the outage.

Hold On to Your Hats! Black Hat 2019 Takes Off!

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And here we go! It’s that time of the year again, when hackers, researchers, gurus, executives, marketers and other assorted animals emerge from their burrows and blink into the bright lights, smoke, noise and crowds of Las Vegas and Black Hat 2019! So much to do, so much to see, so many amazing people, stories and technical innovations to discover. Quite a few of you discovered the SentinelOne booth at #222 today, and it was certainly a delight for us to discover you, too! If you didn’t quite make it today or you dropped by and need a reminder of what you saw after taking in the rest of a busy day, here’s a quick run down on what went on.

image of black hat takes off

SentinelOne Announcement – Protecting Cloud Workloads

Today’s enterprise is all about the cloud, but other security solutions are behind the curve. When you are constantly spinning up multiple containers and web applications, evolving as your business grows, you need the same kind of visibility into what’s happening across your cloud workloads as you enjoy on your physical endpoints. SentinelOne’s Linux agent provides that visibility along with our best-of-class protection on every cloud workload, container and virtual machine on the network. You also need to know which web applications are vulnerable without impacting your productivity. SentinelOne’s Linux agent delivers that and more.

SentinelOne Disrupts the EDR Paradigm

Security teams appreciate the power of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, but SentinelOne is the first and only solution to make this framework the new language of threat hunting by integrating MITRE tactics, techniques and procedures into the threat hunting query workflow.

Analysts can now put behind them the laborious manual work other solutions need in order to correlate and investigate findings. With SentinelOne, just a few clicks will allow security personnel to discover where an attack is coming from, what it is trying to do, and how to fix it.

When an analyst sees an indicator of attack on the network, one or two clicks will reveal the entire context around the TTP: on which devices was it seen? Where did it come from? What else was it trying to do? With SentinelOne, threat hunting is as simple as the click of a button.


Zero Trust: Networks Protecting Endpoints

Our first guest of the day was Amit Bareket, Platform 81 co-founder who came to talk about how Perimeter 81’s Zero Trust Network will integrate with SentinelOne’s autonomous endpoint protection platform to offer business networks a unique and unrivalled protection. Legacy firewalls and VPNs cannot cope with today’s highly mobile users and cloud-based services.

image of perimeter 81

With the help of Perimeter 81, corporate resources and services can be configured to only allow connections to SentinelOne-protected endpoints with no active threats, ensuring that your network and all connected endpoints stay clean of infections. A bad day for worms and attackers intent on lateral movement.

Targeted Content, Behavioral Analytics

Shortly after, we were pleased to welcome Splunk’s Don Leatham to the party, where visitors to Booth 222 were treated to an insightful presentation on how SentinelOne and Splunk work together to provide the essential data that helps keep businesses safe.

image of splunk at black hat

With the help of Splunk’s Security Operations Suite, SOC teams and analysts can get ahead of current and emerging threats through targeted content covering everything from insider threat detection to compliance and more. Don also explained how user behavior analytics can help security teams track anomalous behavior across users, devices and applications.

Context is King

Our third guest of the day was Wendy DeLuca from Recorded Future. Wendy explained how, through integration with the SentinelOne platform, SOC teams could save real time by triaging alerts with real-time context. We’re all aware of the pain felt by SOC teams struggling with security solutions that overwhelm them with too many alerts. Adding to the burden is the difficulty of classifying those alerts in meaningful ways. Without context, analysts are forced to spend precious time on inefficient manual research and threat hunting. And all that noise can lead to the worst possible outcome for the business: a genuine threat that is missed, precisely as happened to Target, resulting in a massive data breach.

image of recorded future

With Recorded Future integrated within the SentinelOne management console, SOC teams can wave goodbye to the bad old days and let the software do the grunt work, freeing up the skilled analyst to concentrate on the tasks that only a human agent can do. Aside from faster response times, the business can also look forward to better ROI on existing security tools as data from, and to, these tools becomes more focused and more relevant.

There’s Parties? Of Course, There’s Parties!

Yeah, right, like you didn’t know…! All work and no play, makes for a dull con, we know that. But while we’re all trying to keep a lid on it and function at our best to get the most out of Black Hat 2019, letting off steam is an essential part of the yin/yang of a good hacker con. On Tuesday, we invited you to let your hair down and join us for a Sin City party with golf, gaming and more. And you all turned up in style!

Conclusion

It was a great first day in the Business Hall and we’re already excited about the response from many of you who came to visit the SentinelOne booth, #222. If you’re around tomorrow, drop in as we’ve got some amazing demos to show including ActiveEDR, device rollback and, the one that’s got all the networking gurus buzzing, Ranger IoT. We can’t wait to see you there!

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Opsani helps optimize cloud applications with AI

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Opsani, a Redwood City, Calif. startup, wants to go beyond performance monitoring to continually optimizing cloud applications, using artificial intelligence to help the software learn what is the optimal state.

“We have come up with a machine learning technique centered around reinforcement learning to tune the performance of applications in the cloud,” company co-founder and CEO Ross Schibler told TechCrunch.

Schibler says each company has its own unique metrics and that’s what they try to optimize around. “We’re modifying these parameters around the resource, and we’re looking at the performance of the application. So in real time, what is the key business metric that the application is producing as a service? So it might be the number of transactions or it might be latency, but if it’s important to the business, then we use that,” he explained.

He claims that what separates Opsani from a monitoring tool like New Relic or AppDynamics is that they watch performance and then provide feedback for admins, but Opsani actually changes the parameters to improve the application performance in real time, based on what it knows about the application and what the developers want to optimize for.

It is also somewhat similar to a company like Spotinst, which optimizes for the cheapest cloud resources, but instead of simply trying to find the best price, Opsani is actually tuning the application.

The company recently announced a $10 million Series A investment led by Redpoint Ventures. Previous investors Zetta Ventures and Bain Capital also participated.

For now, it’s still early days for the startup. It has a dozen employees and a handful of customers, according to Schibler. With the recent $10 million round of funding, it should be able to hire more employees and continue refining the product.

Only 24 hours left to save $100 on TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019

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Heads up all you enterprising enterprise software startuppers. You have only 24 hours before the price goes up on tickets to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019. Save $100 and join us in San Francisco on September 5 — along with some of the industry’s top founders, CEOs, investors and technologists. Buy your early-bird ticket before 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 9.

Enterprise is, without doubt, Silicon Valley’s 800-pound gorilla. No other startup category is as large, rich or competitive. In this day-long conference, we tackle the big topics and separate hype from reality. Artificial intelligence? Check. Cloud, Kubernetes, security and privacy, marketing automation, quantum? Yes. Investors, founders, and acquisition-hungry big enterprise companies? Tons of opportunity to network efficiently via CrunchMatch? Yeah, all that and more in 20 main-stage sessions — plus separate speaker Q&As and breakout sessions. Check out the day’s agenda.

Here’s a quick example of the type of programming you can expect.

Does the recent Capital One data breach have you up nights worried about the cost and consequences of cyberattacks? Don’t miss TechCrunch editor Zack Whittaker’s interview with Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Emily Heath (United Airlines) and Wendy Nather (Duo Security) in a session called, Keeping the Enterprise Secure.

Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CISO and how to move fast… without breaking things.

Looking for more ways to save or boost your ROI? Look no further. Buy four or more tickets at once and save 20% with the group discount. And, with every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, you’ll score a free Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place on September 5, and if you want to save $100, you have just 24 hours left to act. The $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play until 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 9. Buy your ticket now and save.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

‘The Operators’: Experts from Airbnb and Carta on building and managing your company’s customer support

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Tim Hsia & Neil Devani
Contributor

Tim Hsia is the CEO of Media Mobilize and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Neil Devani is an angel investor and venture capitalist focused on companies solving hard problems.
More posts by this contributor

Welcome to this transcribed edition of The Operators. TechCrunch is beginning to publish podcasts from industry experts, with transcriptions available for Extra Crunch members so you can read the conversation wherever you are.

The Operators features insiders from companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Carta, Slack, Uber, and WeWork sharing their stories and tips on how to break into fields like marketing and product management. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs on how to hire and manage experts from domains outside their own.

This week’s edition features Airbnb’s Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products, Andy Yasutake, and Carta’s Head of Enterprise Relationship Management, Jared Thomas.

Airbnb, one of the most valuable private tech companies in the world, has millions of hosts who trust strangers (guests) to come into their homes and hundreds of millions of guests who trust strangers (hosts) to provide a roof over their head. Carta, a $1 Billion+ company formerly known as eShares, is the leading provider of cap table management and valuation software, with thousands of customers and almost a million individual shareholders as users. Customers and users entrust Carta to manage their investments, a very serious responsibility requiring trust and security.

In this episode, Andy and Jared share with Neil how companies like Airbnb, Carta, and LinkedIn think about customer service, how to get into and succeed in the field and tech generally, and how founders should think about hiring and managing the customer support. With their experiences at two of tech’s trusted companies, Airbnb and Carta, this episode is packed with broad perspectives and deep insights.

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Neil Devani and Tim Hsia created The Operators after seeing and hearing too many heady, philosophical podcasts about the future of tech, and not enough attention on the practical day-to-day work that makes it all happen.

Tim is the CEO & Founder of Media Mobilize, a media company and ad network, and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Tim is an early-stage investor in Workflow (acquired by Apple), Lime, FabFitFun, Oh My Green, Morning Brew, Girls Night In, The Hustle, Bright Cellars, and others.

Neil is an early-stage investor based in San Francisco with a focus on companies building stuff people need, solutions to very hard problems. Companies he’s invested in include Andela, Clearbit, Kudi, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Solugen, and Vicarious Surgical.

If you’re interested in starting or accelerating your marketing career, or how to hire and manage this function, you can’t miss this episode!

The show:

The Operators brings experts with experience at companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Carta, Slack, Uber, WeWork, etc. to share insider tips on how to break into fields like marketing and product management. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs on how to hire and manage experts from domains outside their own.

In this episode:

In Episode 5, we’re talking about customer service. Neil interviews Andy Yasutake, Airbnb’s Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products, and Jared Thomas, Carta’s Head of Enterprise Relationship Management.

Neil Devani: Hello and welcome to the Operators, where we talk to entrepreneurs and executives from leading technology companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Carta about how to break into a new field, how to build a successful career, and how to hire and manage talent beyond your own expertise. We skip over the lofty prognostications from venture capitalists and storytime with founders to dig into the nuts and bolts of how it all works here from the people doing the real day to day work, the people who make it all happen, the people who know what it really takes. The Operators.

Today we are talking to two experts in customer service, one with hundreds of millions of individual paying customers and the other being the industry standard for managing equity investments. I’m your host, Neil Devani, and we’re coming to you today from Digital Garage in downtown San Francisco.

Joining me is Jared Thomas, head of Enterprise Relationship Management at Carta, a $1 billion-plus company after a recent round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Carta, formerly known as eShares, is the leading provider of cap table management and valuation software with thousands of customers and almost a million individual shareholders as users. Customers and users trust Carta to manage their investments, a very serious responsibility requiring trust and security.

Also joining us is Andy Yasutake, the Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products at Airbnb, one of the most valuable private tech startups today. Airbnb has millions of hosts who are trusting strangers to come into their homes and hundreds of millions of guests who are trusting someone to provide a roof over their head. The number of cases and types of cases that Andy and his team have to think about and manage boggle the mind. Jared and Andy, thank you for joining us.

Andy Yasutake: Thank you for having us.

Jared Thomas: Thank you so much.

Devani: To start, Andy, can you share your background and how you got to where you are today?

Yasutake: Sure. I’m originally from southern California. I was born and raised in LA. I went to USC for undergrad, University of Southern California, and I actually studied psychology and information systems.

Late-90s, the dot com was going on, I’d always been kind of interested in tech, went into management consulting at interstate consulting that became Accenture, and was in consulting for over 10 years and always worked on large systems of implementation of technology projects around customers. So customer service, sales transformation, anything around CRM, as kind of a foundation, but it was always very technical, but really loved the psychology part of it, the people side.

And so I was always on multiple consulting projects and one of the consulting projects with actually here in the Bay Area. I eventually moved up here 10 years ago and joined eBay, and at eBay I was the director of product for the customer services organization as well. And was there for five years.

I left for Linkedin, so another rocket ship that was growing and was the senior director of technology solutions and operations where I had all the kind of business enabling functions as well as the technology, and now have been at Airbnb for about four months. So I’m back to kind of my, my biggest passion around products and in the customer support and community experience and customer service world.

Rookout lands $8M Series A to expand debugging platform

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Rookout, a startup that provides debugging across a variety of environments, including serverless and containers, announced an $8 million Series A investment today. It plans to use the money to expand beyond its debugging roots.

The round was led by Cisco Investments along with existing investors TLV Partners and Emerge. Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub; John Kodumal, CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly; and Raymond Colletti, VP of revenue at Codecov also participated.

“Rookout from day one has been working to provide production debugging and collection capabilities to all platforms,” Or Weis, co-founder and CEO of Rookout told TechCrunch. That has included serverless like AWS Lambda, containers and Kubernetes and Platform-as-a-Service like Google App Engine and Elastic Beanstalk.

The company is also giving visibility into platforms that are sometimes hard to observe because of the ephemeral nature of the technology, and that go beyond its pure debugging capabilities. “In the last year, we’ve discovered that our customers are finding completely new ways to use Rookout’s code-level data collection capabilities and that we need to accommodate, support and enhance the many varied uses of code-level observability and pipelining,” Weiss said in a statement.

It was particularly telling that a company like Cisco was deeply involved in the round. Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Global Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, likes the developer focus of the company.

“Developers have become key influencers of enterprise IT spend. By collecting data on-demand without re-deploying, Rookout created a Developer-centric software, which short-circuits complexities in the production debugging, increases Developer efficiency and reduces the friction which exists between IT Ops and Developers,” Salvagno said in a statement.

Rookout, which launched in 2017, has offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, with a total of 20 employees. It has raised more than $12 million.

Rookout releases serverless debugging tool for AWS Lambda

Only 48 hours left for early-bird tickets to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019

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If enterprise software makes your entrepreneurial heart beat faster, you do not want to miss TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 on September 5 in San Francisco. And if you really want to make your heart sing, buy an early-bird ticket and save $100. But act quickly, because that deal disappears in just 48 hours on August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Join more than 1,000 enterprise software experts and aficionados — leaders, rising founders and VCs — to discuss, explore and gain insight into the current and future state of enterprise companies, trends and technology.

This day-long conference features more than 20 sessions on the Main stage including interviews, panel discussions, plus separate speaker Q&As and breakout sessions. You’ll hear from industry giants like these (to name just a few):

  • George Brady, CTO at Capital One
  • Jim Clarke, Intel’s director of Quantum Hardware
  • Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO at Atlassian
  • Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO
  • Aparna Sinha, Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes and Anthos

Our presentations cover a wide range of crucial topics — like this one featuring Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz) and Wendy Nather (Duo Security):

Keeping the Enterprise Secure: Enterprises face a litany of threats from both the inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast… without breaking things.

You’ll find the lineup of events in the agenda, and we might even add a few surprises between now and September.

No TechCrunch Session would be complete without world-class networking, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to build new connections. Even better, you’ll have CrunchMatch at your disposal. Our free business match-making platform helps you cut through the noise, zero in on the right people and produce better results.

You can’t clone yourself (yet), but you can bring your team and cover more ground. Take advantage of our group discount and save 20% when you purchase four or more tickets at once.

One more ROI checkpoint. For every ticket you buy to this Session, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place in less than one month, but the early-bird price evaporates in just 48 hours. Buy your early-bird ticket before the deadline — August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Save $100 and make your heart sing.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Ment.io wants to help your team make decisions

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Getting even the most well-organized team to agree on anything can be hard. Tel Aviv’s Ment.io, formerly known as Epistema, wants to make this process easier by applying smart design and a dose of machine learning to streamline the decision-making process.

Like with so many Israeli startups, Ment.io’s co-founders Joab Rosenberg and Tzvika Katzenelson got their start in Israel’s intelligence service. Indeed, Rosenberg spent 25 years in the intelligence service, where his final role was that of the deputy head analyst. “Our story starts from there, because we had the responsibility of gathering the knowledge of a thousand analysts, surrounded by tens of thousands of collection unit soldiers,” Katzenelson, who is Ment.io’s CRO, told me. He noted that the army had turned decision making into a form of art. But when the founders started looking at the tech industry, they found a very different approach to decision making — and one that they thought needed to change.

If there’s one thing the software industry has, it’s data and analytics. These days, the obvious thing to do with all of that information is to build machine learning models, but Katzenelson (rightly) argues that these models are essentially black boxes. “Data does not speak for itself. Correlations that you may find in the data are certainly not causations,” he said. “Every time you send analysts into the data, they will come up with some patterns that may mislead you.”

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So Ment.io is trying to take a very different approach. It uses data and machine learning, but it starts with questions and people. The service actually measures the level of expertise and credibility every team member has around a given topic. “One of the crazy things we’re doing is that for every person, we’re creating their cognitive matrix. We’re able to tell you within the context of your organization how believable you are, how balanced you are, how clearly you are being perceived by your counterparts, because we are gathering all of your clarification requests and every time a person challenges you with something.”Ment1

At its core, Ment.io is basically an internal Q&A service. Anybody can pose questions and anybody can answer them with any data source or supporting argument they may have.

“We’re doing structuring,” Katzenelson explained. “And that’s basically our philosophy: knowledge is just arguments and counterarguments. And the more structure you can put in place, the more logic you can apply.”

In a sense, the company is doing this because natural language processing (NLP) technology isn’t yet able to understand the nuances of a discussion.Ment6If you’re anything like me, though, the last thing you want is to have to use yet another SaaS product at work. The Ment.io team is quite aware of that and has built a deep integration with Slack already and is about to launch support for Microsoft Teams in the next few days, which doesn’t come as a surprise, given that the team has participated in the Microsoft ScaleUp accelerator program.

The overall idea here, Katzenelson explained, is to provide a kind of intelligence layer on top of tools like Slack and Teams that can capture a lot of the institutional knowledge that is now often shared in relatively ephemeral chats.

Ment.io is the first Israeli company to raise funding from Peter Thiel’s late-stage fund, as well as from the Slack Fund, which surely creates some interesting friction, given the company’s involvement with both Slack and Microsoft, but Katzenelson argues that this is not actually a problem.

Microsoft is also a current Ment.io customer, together with the likes of Intel, Citibank and Fiverr.

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