How Google Torpedoed A Cybersecurity Rising Star

CYBER

VICE

Tech News, News & Politics, Technology, News

4 • 645 Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s the classic story of a corporate giant swallowing up a darling startup into its ranks and destroying its core business.

Originally a spawn of the Alphabet company—Google’s parent umbrella—Chronicle was a cybersecurity startup considered by many to be a game changer: it was going to leverage machine learning and Alphabet’s endless supply of malware samples and technical data via Google, and fuse it into an over the counter product that infosec units in companies all over the world could use to make the Internet better for everyone.

It seemed, to many, this was a cybersecurity company that wasn’t hawking snakeoil, but a real, helpful product. And part of its allure was that Chronicle would not join its corporate overlord outright, but instead remain independent of Google.

Then it was announced they were going to join Google and everyone jumped ship. Now, as one employee put it, “Chronicle is dead.” In other words, one of the cybersecurity industry's most promising startups is falling apart after one of the most profitable companies in the world took it over.

This week we have Lorenzo Francheschi Bichierrai on the show to tell us about the internal struggles of Chronicle.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Tann, it's got the code it's going to launch.
0:11.0	It's a unit system.
0:13.0	I know this.
0:15.0	It's all the files of the whole park.
0:17.0	It tells her everything.
0:19.0	Sir, he's uploading the virus.
0:21.8	Eagle won.
0:22.6	The package is being delivered.
0:25.3	It's the classic story of a corporate behemoth swallowing up a darling startup into its ranks.
0:31.5	Except in our era of Silicon Valley Juggernauts, it's Google taking over cybersecurity company, Chronicle. Originally a spawn of the Alphabet company, Google's parent umbrella.
0:42.3	Chronicle recently joined Google Cloud, making Chronicle employees part of the Internet search engine God.
0:48.3	Then people started jumping ship.
0:51.3	Now one of the cybersecurity industry's most promising startups is falling apart after one of the
0:57.5	most profitable companies in the world took it over.
1:00.7	This week we have Lorenzo Franceschi Bikirai on the show to give us the scoop on the
1:05.3	internal struggles of Chronicle.
1:08.2	I'm Ben Maku, and this is Cyber.
1:13.9	All right, so Lorenzo, for the uninitiated, what is Chronicle?
1:19.5	Chronicle is a startup that came out of Alphabet's secretive incubator known as X,
1:26.3	and it was announced last year in January, January 2018,
1:29.7	and it was supposed to be this super exciting new thing that combined virus total,
1:35.5	which is this amazing database of malware,
	...

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