Lessons from Norse's impending implosion

In a culture where entrepreneurs who've "failed fast" many times over are considered to be thoroughbreds, is it any wonder investors can be taken for a ride by over-confident assholes? Frankly, the security industry has a lot of smoke and mirrors companies, and always has. It's a complex industry with an almost impossible stated goal; "make things perfectly safe."

So, the security market is largely about tools bought by people who don't know anything about security, built by people who know they're building stuff that's only a half-measure, and sold to people looking for a perfect solution in a world where nothing even remotely like that can exist.

The best security companies tend to come from really good, really smart hacker/programmers, not from smart business guys who move fast and take heads.

Norse looked pretty. That's pretty much the whole story right there. People who don't understand security could look at the map and go, "Neat! It looks like a movie!" That's the entire fucking story of this company. They sold something pretty but ultimately useless. It could have been useful, but they had no interest in making it useful because making it useful took resources away from making it more pretty.