I wonder if there's a bet to be made on future 8K disclosures following quietly updated signing keys. A bet against F5 placed this morning would've only made 3.6%.
I think Shape Security qualifies for this list. They raised $100M before having a customer, seemed to die, quietly got adopted by a large pool of F50 companies, and exited to F5 for a $1B valuation. That’s a big chunk of change for a security play, especially back in 2019.
Their moat ended up being two fold. One, they were the only tech stack that could handle the scale needed back then. Two, they had a crazy culture of never letting adversaries win and would push daily updates to keep attackers off their customers. Both took a long time to iterate and build towards and nobody thought it was cool while they worked through it.
Some of us prefer to enjoy sex as a beautiful act of human connection and condoms detract from being in the moment of joy.
This is like saying to someone killed in a motorcycle accident why didn’t you use a car. It’s a reductive, unempathetic and frankly unproductive take. Please think before asking this again.
I ran into it about a year ago with Verizon. No Dickinsons allowed! Sadly the only FTTH around, so I had to have support give me permission to have my name.
I can vaguely imagine how someone would _think_ its a good idea (it's not, to be clear) on a website where users might see other users' names, something like CRM SaaS. I can't understand how anyone would think that validating users' real names on a purely customer-facing website is a good idea. Maybe frustrated customers (can't imagine why) have names like FuckVerizon on their account?
It would be rather silly to assume all bears have the same last name "bear"! It's not as if people all walk around saying "Oh hi I'm Timothy Human" "Nice to meet you, I'm Rachel Human, are we related?"
Which, come to think of it, is kind of a funny notion, and a nice reminder that despite our differences we really are all related!