Episode Summary

Every role in cybersecurity is changing fast, but most practitioners are still treating AI like a glorified search engine. In this solo episode of Secured, Cole Cornford shares his unfiltered take on three things on his mind right now: entrepreneurship in a tough market, the growing threat to SaaS product businesses from roll your own culture, and why the cyber industry needs a fundamentally different approach to AI.

Cole makes the case that saying "hey Claude" is the least effective way to work with AI today, and that the real conversation has nothing to do with which model you pick. It is about how you interact with it, how you build a harness around it, and how you stop letting third party wrappers make all the decisions for you. He also shares early thinking on an AI course he is building for security professionals, covering AI fundamentals, using AI for security, and securing AI products.

Along the way he tackles the rule of three as a framework for prioritising in a small business, why product moats are disappearing fast, and what qualities he is actually looking for when hiring graduates in a market where everyone is cutting them.

Timestamps

00:00 Trailer

01:01 Chainguard ad

01:28 Intro and today's three topics

02:30 Entrepreneurship in a tough market

04:30 The rule of three and how Cole runs his business

07:00 Why SaaS product moats are disappearing

10:00 Roll your own vs buying commercial security tools

13:30 When rolling your own actually makes sense

16:00 Cash flow warning for Australian business owners

18:00 Why Cole is building an AI course for security professionals

21:00 Models vs harnesses and why most people get this wrong

24:00 How the cyber industry needs to change its approach to AI

27:00 What Cole looks for when hiring graduates right now

30:00 Systems thinking, humanities and the skills that still matter

33:00 Grandma's pot and questioning everything you think you know

35:00 Closing thoughts

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