Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland, and I am here with my partner in crime,

Sonal Chuxi, today. And we are lucky to have Kim Zetter, a senior staff writer at Wired,

who covers all things security. Kim, welcome. Thank you very much.

So, Kim, you know, we wanted to actually talk to you about what's going with RSA coming up,

with what's going on in the security world, and starting with, like, all these hacks that have

been happening lately, is it, is it, is it like a lot more than what's been happening before?

Or are we just hearing about it more?

I mean, I'm talking about big companies from Target to the Sony hack.

I mean, there's talking about big companies from Target to the Sony hack. I mean,

there's just been so many. Like, you could probably list more of them than I can.

Yeah, I mean, all of this has happened before. What is happening here is the government's

focus on cybersecurity, and by government, I mean the Obama administration specifically,

has made cybersecurity one of its primary focuses.

And that has been trickled down and caused everyone else to focus on this more, because

that means money now is going into cybersecurity.

So the business world is focusing on it as well.

In terms of the number of hacks, that's sort that's sort of the result of the media, obviously,

paying more attention and the public paying more attention.

But we've always had these kinds of hacks.

Even, you know, the hacks against Target and Home Depot, we had a series of hacks back in 2008 and 2010

against TjX and Barnes & Noble and companies like that.

So what changes is in some of these hacks that we get a little smarter with security,

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