Transcript 0:00 Talk to me. Information, news, and entertainment on demand. Montgomerywestradio.com [on-hold music] 0:13 Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT in our connected world, with your host, Peggy Smedley. Hello, listeners, um, welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:25 My final guest founded an internet infrastructure company connecting people, content, and commerce when he was a student at Worchester Polytechnic Institute. He grew the business which was later acquired by Oracle. 0:38 He started his current business in twenty seventeen, and this company is an IoT networking and security company that was inspired by the DDoS, uh, against Dyn on October twenty-- uh, October twenty-first in two thousand and sixteen. 0:54 Please welcome Jeremy Hitchcock, founder and CEO of Minum. Jeremy, welcome to the show. Jeremy, you there? Think we're having a little trouble getting Jeremy on. 1:11 Well, while they're trying to get Jeremy on the phone here, we think we have a little trouble. 1:15 Um, Jeremy's company is kind of an interesting, while they're trying to connect with him, um, his company, which is great, raised about two point five million seed round to secure in the Internet of Things. 1:28 Uh, Jeremy's really a great, uh, got a great story, um, because the seed funding was led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Founder, uh, Collective, which, uh, kind of marks a great launch for him. 1:42 And Jeremy's story is really great because last year, he really decided after the Mirai attacks, the DDoS attacks affected his company. 1:53 He co-founded the Dyn s-kind of story, which I like about it because we all know, if you all remember, that it affected, I think it was like some over six hundred thousand residential connected devices. 2:07 Remember, uh, the IP cameras, uh, printers, the baby monitors. Jeremy, you there? I am here. Thank you. Good morning. Hey. And then good afternoon. Great to get you on the phone. 2:19 I was just telling everyone, all the listeners, about the story about what drove you to kind of found the company a little bit, but you probably could tell the story better than I can, um, with the whole, uh, the DDoS attack. 2:31 So, um, talk a little bit about why you decided to start this company. Well, well, I'll try. Uh, you know, thanks for having me on the show. 2:38 Uh, you know, it started off, uh, from a company that I founded about fifteen years ago, Dyn, which is a, a little-known internet infrastructure company. 2:46 It runs a lot of traffic for the Amazons and, and Twitters and Pandoras of the world, and probably most people would know of it now that it's was recently acquired by Oracle. 2:56 Uh, but in the end of, uh, two thousand sixteen, there was this big denial service attack that took place against Dyn, and it interrupted a lot of internet in the East Coast of the United States. 3:06 Uh, and I certainly remember that day very fondly. It was October twenty-first. 3:10 And, and really what it was, it was all of these connected cameras and routers and devices that were, uh, essentially the victims of this big denial of service attack, and it wasn't as if it was like some nation-state type of attack. 3:22 It was a couple of Minecraft gamers that just had grudges against each other, and they pooled up an attack, and then they, they launched this off, and it, it, it showed that, you know, within a weekend, a few people could spend not that much time and energy taking down a company I'd spent fifteen years building and, and really created the inspiration to solve IoT and management connectivity, uh, you know, really for, for today's purposes, and that was the, uh, inspiration behind Minum. 3:48 So let's talk about Minum. What is the goal now? Because your solution, you know, you, you've got some seed funding here a little bit. What are you hoping to do? 3:57 Because we always talk about here, if a device isn't secure, you know, it's open to, you know, those nefarious characters out there, which you just described. 4:05 And I think if we talk about the, the Mirai malware infected more than six hundred thousand devices. And so what are you hoping to do now and in helping with, you know, this automation market that we're talking about? 4:20 Well, just the number of devices that people are installing in their homes is really exploding. I mean, we're all trying different things out. 4:27 If you, you think back ten years ago to the iOS store and the App Store, I mean, people were just downloading apps, and the same thing with buying IoT-connected apps or these hardware, uh, things that give us function, give us utility at home, uh, or in a small office environment, but they're not necessarily put together with the best software. 4:47 Uh, and that's, I think, the, the real crux of the issue is that we're expecting these devices to perform very well. And, and consumers bring them home, and they say, "They don't work the right way. 4:56 I can't get them connected." Um, you know, they leave them connected, and then they get infected. Companies that make these devices, they don't support them long term. 5:04 And, and really what we wanna do is, is partner with, with consumers and internet service providers to make a better experience at home by really extending the management of service providers so that way they're in the home. 5:16 When you think about the enterprise environment, there's been this concept of bring your own device. 5:21 You could bring a, a, a cell phone, and it's, and it's supported by your, your corporate environment, and it just kinda works, and there's layers of security, and there's layers of network management. 5:30 But you as a homeowner, you buy a camera that you buy at a retail store, whether it's Target, Best Buy, and you bring it home, you're your own network administrator, security administrator. 5:39 So the first person that you call is typically your internet service provider or maybe you have, like, that friend or that guru. 5:44 And so we're really looking at trying to empower the service providers and gurus of the world to be able to solve those connectivity and security issues. And, and are we doing that? 5:54 Shouldn't some of the security be in the, you know, s- we say shouldn't it be in the device manufacturers making sure their devices are secure?Well, we, we think so, but we're also probably taking a pragmatic approach that, you know, there's questions about product liability, there's questions about kind of secure by design. 6:11 Um, and, and, you know, I think the, the fundamental reality is not everything is gonna be super secure when it gets, when it gets shipped and installed. 6:18 So we take a notion that of this virtual patching and being able pre-prevent things from, um, infecting others, that there are known vulnerabilities out in the field. 6:28 Um, you know, I think the best thing that device manufacturers can do is make sure that their devices auto-update by default. I think consumers don't like that because they have to say, "Okay. 6:37 Yeah, I'll update, I'll update tonight." 6:39 But it's really a good hygiene because, you know, software gets better all the time, and one of the things that gets better is these software, uh, vulnerabilities that get discovered, they, they sometimes get patched. 6:50 And not every company has a, a good mindset towards security and rigor, and what happens when these things get taken advantage of is they don't work, they steal your information, they make your network at home slow, and, um, lots of other bad things. 7:07 So are there other products like yours, Jeremy, or, or what makes yours unique compa- unique compared to some of the others that are out there that you guys were able to get such good funding right now? 7:17 I think we're, we're just, we're taking a few different approaches that's, that's maybe a little novel or unique. 7:22 Um, you know, we're taking a lot of enterprise best practices of like what the Palo Altos have done, the Splunks have done in the enterprise world, where they've, they've turned network management into more of a, more of a science and less of an art, and we're trying to do that in the home. 7:36 And, and one thing that we're super sympathetic towards is that, uh, the dynamic between service provider and the consumer, the subscriber at home isn't, isn't really a strong one, and so we're trying to create this shared symp- sense of empathy. 7:49 Um, right now you, you have a cable modem at home or a DSL modem or a fiber modem, and that's a service provider's, and, and they probably own it, and they control it, and they manage it. 7:59 And you buy a, a Nest Camera, and, and you buy that, and you manage it and control it. 8:03 And, and we're creating this sense of, of a shared environment where both parties might have some type of sense of being able to manage those devices. 8:12 So I think those two dynamics are, are really going into some of the products that we deliver, and so we, you know, we deliver basically a care portal to service providers and to care professionals to have a best-in-class experience for supporting others. 8:25 Um, a-and we also look at, at the security based on the, the fingerprinting that we're doing 'cause I, I think the, the fundamental difference of being able to do this world-class security stuff that we do is, is by understanding the devices that are in the home and say, "Oh, that's a, that's a, that's a doorknob, so it's gonna a-act and respond like a doorknob or a door lock is going to." 8:44 And if it starts looking something different, well, you know that it's... there's something wrong with it. 8:48 And, you know, already we've, we've seen a, a bunch of things, uh, out in the wild that haven't been reported before, and, and we're, we're looking forward to continuing our coverage and, and making, uh, making people's homes more secure. 9:00 Well, hey, Jeremy, we're out of time, but thank you so much for joining us. Where can our listeners go to find more about Minum and all the things you guys are doing? 9:08 Go to Minum, M-I-N-I-M.co, and look forward to hearing from people. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Hey, Jer- Jeremy Hitchcock, thank you so much for being with us. 9:17 All right, we're out of time, listeners, so stick around. I mean, thanks for joining us. Oh, you can't stick around. We're out of time. [laughs] Remember, we're broadcast live every Tuesday at twelve PM Central. 9:26 You can go out to our website at thepeggySmedleyShow.com, or you can check out all the articles we have on connectedworld.com. We've put up some new ones. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this week's show. 9:37 Remember, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and relevant technology. Remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have an awesome week. 9:51 [upbeat music] With great technology comes great responsibility. 10:05 Follow Internet of Things tech expert and futurist Peggy Smedley, repeatedly ranked as a top IoT and M2M influencer. 10:13 Go to Peggy_Smedley on Twitter for her take on the latest tech news and lively interviews with other industry insiders on her weekly radio show. Visit twitter.com and search for Peggy_Smedley to follow her today. 10:28 [upbeat music] Video consumption is on the rise, so to reach this audience, Constructek Magazine created Constructek TV. 10:39 Constructek TV helps construction professionals leverage emerging solutions to better their business. Tune in to constructek.tv to catch the latest show on the first and third Tuesday of each month. 10:50 Like, view, and subscribe to constructek.tv. Bringing dynamic video to construction. 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