July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Not every company achieves a billion dollars in sales, pays new hires $2,000 to quit, or makes the Fortune Magazine lists of “best places in America” to work. And not every company has a 500-page “culture book” that defines who and what it is.

Zappos, the online shoe-and-almost-everything-else retailer, is known for having an amazing corporate culture. The company’s corporate goal, which started out as “delivering wow,” is now “delivering happiness.” But it also delivers a lot of revenue.

How?

I talked to David Vik, the “coach” of Zappos who joined the company as the 119th employee. He focused on building people and building a positive corporate culture, and scrawled the graphic that would eventually become its iconic shoe-as-exclamation-mark logo. He not only helped Zappos build its globally-famous culture, he also transformed his most recent company, recruiting firm Riviera Partners, from “12 angry people” to one of Inc. Magazines’ fastest-growing companies.

Vik recently published “The Culture Secret,” a book about empowering people — and companies — through vision, purpose, and pure wow.

VentureBeat: What was your role at Zappos?

Vik: I was just “Coach” of Zappos … kind of like being a coach of a sports team. My focus was to empower employees to reach their potential, and to drive the culture.

VentureBeat: You were a chiropractor before that, right? How’d that transition happen?

Vik: Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos, was a patient of mine, and I invested in the company. In fact, I sketched out the logo with a shoe in it.

I had retired after 22 years as a chiropractor, building one of most successful clinics in the States, but after I retired there was nothing to do. So I went to the company’s startup day for new hires when there were 118 people in the company.

At the end of the day, Tony (CEO Tony Hsieh) had them vote on me … and they wanted to me to join the company!

VentureBeat: A ton has been written about Zappos’ culture. What’s unique about Zappos?

Vik: Their vision, which originally was to deliver wow, and now is to deliver happiness.

Selling shoes is a commodity … so you have to do it different than anyone else. We built a huge selection and had the idea that you could buy whatever you wanted and return what you didn’t want for free. The focus of every department was on delivering wow.

What I did was deliver wow to our employees … I had a throne in my office and had thousands of visitors, all of who sat in my throne. You’re a king in your life, you were built and born to reach your potential, and I wanted them to feel that.

It started with the employees, and they delivered it to our clients.

VentureBeat: Are there some core needed elements of a great culture in any company?

Vik: Well, yes, that’s the reason I wrote the book.

See, culture is squishy … people say ‘We’ll let dogs come in, and we’ll put beanbag chairs in the office, bring in foosball tables.’ But that’s just window dressing. The culture is what you do and how you do it, it encompasses everything.

What I’ve found is you need five structures:

• vision: what you’re doing
• purpose: why you do it
• business model: what will fuel you as you’re doing it
• wow and uniqueness factors: what sets you apart from others
• values: what matters to you

When everyone knows it, they can get behind it, and then they don’t have to be told what to do. For instance, at Apple, it’s tools for the mind, and employees have the autonomy to create and invent what tools of the mind they’re going to make.

A lot of companies have a long mission statement, and no one can remember it. You need something very short: this is what we do, and this is why we do it.

VentureBeat: What kills a company’s culture — or at least a positive culture?

Vik: Companies just get off track.

First off, they don’t articulate what they are, and then it kind of becomes culture by default. Leadership can also destroy a culture by managing people (when you should only manage things, not people). Often it just kinda gets watered down. Companies start off with a great vision and purpose and then it kind of gets diluted.

Vision and purpose are not transaction based, but need to be experience based. For example, a car rental company isn’t about renting cars: They should say we’re connecting people.

In the past, companies were company-centric, but today they have to be customer-centric. They have to be in alignment with the wants, needs, and demands of the customer. If not, they’re going to die. Fifty years ago, the average lifetime of an S&P company was 50 years, and now it’s only 25 years.

Some companies think they’re the only gal in an Alaska bar.

VentureBeat: What about in tough times? How can a company work on culture when the house is burning down?

Vik: It’s simple. Customers vote with their pocketbooks whether they like you or not. So companies need to quit being company-centric and start being customer-centric.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. It’s not about masseuses and prime rib. Those are cool things, but in many cases, it’s like a rich parent giving their kids a ton of money and toys, but not their time. If you want a great culture, you sit down, and talk: How are you doing, how’s your family, what can I do to help you out?

In the old days, the machines were the assets and the people were expendable. Now it’s the opposite.

VentureBeat: What role did Tony play in Zappos’ culture?

Vik: Huge. He had a real big role.

Tony had a company before Zappos and he sold it when it got to about 100 people. He said it wasn’t fun anymore —  it wasn’t a fun place to come to work. He wanted to change that, and I think that’s one of the reasons he hired me.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

In an effort to uncover the truth about the American startup scene, Australian entrepreneur Simon Walker embarked upon a quest. He flew around the world to visit 10 American cities in 20 days. He met with local members of the startup community and created a video series called the Leeap Project documenting his journey. His goal is to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of startup life in those areas and inspire people around the world to start (and invest) in emerging companies.

The latest installment of the Leeap Project takes place in San Francisco. Walker and I met for coffee shortly after his arrival to discuss the project. Due to my perpetual lateness, he was forced to wait for 15 minutes on a street corner of questionable character. Fortunately, he did not hold this against me, and we were able to discuss the local entrepreneurial ecosystem over black coffees.

“People in Australia and New Zealand get a skewed perspective on startups,” he said. “Their perception is generalized to all of America, and they think that everyone that wants to have a startup can just get cash easily. Back in Melbourne, I really wanted to know what life was really like here for entrepreneurs and knew others who felt the same. I am trying to create an educated, informed, and outside perspective.”

While here, Walker stayed at the Villa of Bravo’s Silicon Valley reality show infamy. He met with local influencers and discovered a few key points about San Francisco. First and foremost, he realized that referring to the city as “San Fran” is the kiss of death.

I reconnected with Walker after he returned to Australia and finished this video to find out what else he learned.

“One unique aspect about S.F. seemed to be the capability to raise funds on an idea fueled by passion, rather than a proven business with preexisting traction and users/customers,” he said. “Most of the entrepreneurs I spoke with also seemed to have very much an insular or ‘tunnel vision’ view toward things. Everyone in S.F. seems to be so completely consumed with their own startup that the bigger picture sometimes didn’t even come into view.”

Watch the full video below:

Check out the first installment of the Leeap Project in Los Angeles.

The first people you hire in your startup are critical to your company’s success. So it’s easy to say that you need to hire the “absolute best people you can find.” But what does this actually mean?

Take two different spectrums: First, competence and second, cultural fit. Imagine that you have a spectrum for each person from low to high.

Now, you obviously will not hire someone who is low on both competence and cultural fit. And you obviously will hire someone who is high on both competence and culture fit. But what about the other two cases?

Many people default into choosing people who have high competence but a low cultural fit. This is a deadly mistake in a startup, as this is exactly the wrong person to hire.

While they may have great skills for the role you are looking for, the overhead of managing and integrating this person into your young team will be extremely difficult. This is especially true if they are in a leadership position, as they will hire other people who have a cultural fit with them rather than with the organization, creating even more polarization within your young company.

In contrast, people with low competence but a high culture fit are also not great hires. But if they are “medium” competence, or high competence in a related role, or early in their career and ambitious about learning new skills, they may be worth taking a risk.

While you always want to shoot for high competence, high cultural fit people when you are hiring early in your company’s life, it’s always better to chose cultural fit over competence when you have to make a choice.

If you are interested in working with a company that is an expert at figuring this out, go take a look at RoundPegg. (Disclosure: RoundPegg is a TechStars-incubated company, and Feld is a TechStars mentor and co-founder.)

This story initially appeared on Brad Feld’s own blog, Feld Thoughts.

Brad Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group who lives in Boulder, Colo. He invests in software and Internet companies around the US, runs marathons, and reads a lot.

Top image courtesy of ollyy, Shutterstock

For the second year running, GitHub is calling all San Francisco developers to get their dodgeball on for a good cause.

The Second Annual GitHub Dodgeball Invitational will take place Sunday, Nov. 11, 2012. This year, 24 teams of 10 to 12 members each will compete; each team will need to rustle up a $3,000 donation to participate.

The money goes to a few local charities, including two San Francisco writing and literacy programs, our city’s public libraries, and the Second Harvest food bank.

At last year’s event, Heroku bested all the other teams, who came from “it” startups like Twitter, Twilio, and their ilk and who collectively raised $57,000 for charities.

“This year we’re going bigger, with more teams and more donations,” declared GitHub on the event page.

“We’ve even paired up with the folks from the World Dodgeball Society to help make this year’s tournament more awesome than last year!”

The invitational takes place at the Soma Rec Center at 6th Street and Folsom Street. Tournament play starts at 1:30 p.m. and run for three hours. Finals start at 5 p.m., with an awards ceremony at 6 p.m. and an afterparty starting promptly at 7 p.m.

And y’all better dress to impress. Check out last year’s photo gallery for fashion cues:

Looks like Andreessen-Horowitz is building out its social investments side of the business. It came out today that the venture firm hired Twitter culture guru Elizabeth Weil to help expand its social know-how.

“Three years at Twitter have flown by. Honored to have worked alongside this amazing crew. Thrilled to be joining the Andreessen Horowitz team!” she tweeted today.

She reportedly joins Andreessen-Horowitz’s social team, fittingly, and will be working directly with Mark Cranney. He’s somewhat of an in-house coach for the firm’s startups, helping them launch, make money, and find talent. It is unknown whether Weil will be recruiting new companies or helping those that make it in to succeed.

At Twitter, Weil held a number of positions, but most recently she headed up the company’s culture — something that’s precious to Silicon Valley startups. In her spare time she runs a paper crafts business called Paperwheel. She’s married to Twitter’s director of products for revenue, Kevin Weil.

This is far from Weil’s first time working for a venture capital firm as well. She has held positions at Institutional Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, as a senior associate and analyst respectively.

hat tip All Things D; Bird image via Shutterstock; Elizabeth Weil image via LinkedIn

Here’s a sweet little tidbit from the developer world: Twitter and Etsy have worked out an engineer exchange program that will have the two companies trading devs back and forth, all the better for both teams’ growth and development.

It’s like that ABC show Wife Swap, but with developers instead of wives and probably a bit less awkwardness and drama. Probably.

In a post on the program, Etsy engineering VP Marc Hedlund (pictured above) said the swap will help all engineers from both teams absorb the best parts of one another’s culture, work practices, and generally, ” what makes each other tick.”

The swaps will last a week and will send engineers traveling coast to coast from Twitter’s San Francisco digs to Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters. The devs will go through an accelerated bootcamp/orientation process and then will start pushing code into production.

“It takes a level of trust to let an unknown engineer into the fold, let them sit in on meetings, and make changes to code,” Hedlund writes of the program.

“Of course, some people would be uncomfortable with letting this happen; companies we’ve both worked for would have fits before allowing it. But we believe the value of cross-pollination of ideas and practices is far too high to be blocked by these concerns. While this is an experiment, we’re hopeful it makes both teams stronger, and we’ll be looking for other exchanges to do soon.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Twitter and Etsy have similar (read: hipster) cultures already in place and that the companies don’t compete with their products. But Hedlund has make some interesting moves in the past to make Etsy’s engineering team stronger.

In fact, just this past summer, Hedlund championed an effort to create grants to train women in computer science with the end goal of bringing more female engineers into the Etsy fold.

“The company has historically had many very strong and talented women working with us, but not enough of them in Engineering and Operations,” said Hedlund in an exclusive VentureBeat interview at the time. “We felt that we had a better shot at making a meaningful difference on this issue than almost anyone out there, and that in some ways we stood to benefit more, too.”

Top image courtesy of James Duncan Davidson.

It’s the weekend and that means I get to post whatever I want [editor's note: this is false]. So I’m going to barrage GamesBeat with some of my various favorite gaming culture discoveries, starting with this delightfully morbid The Legend of Zelda strip by dalia on deviantArt.

You can also check out the alternate director’s cut ending here:

via deviantArt

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

I’ve often been asked, “Why did you found ZestCash in Los Angeles?” This is polite code for “You’re an idiot. There are no good software engineers outside of Silicon Valley. You can’t build a technology company anywhere else.”

Robert Solow won a Nobel Prize in Economics for arguing that labor is the source of comparative advantage. If it is possible to address Silicon Valley’s comparative advantage in engineers, then technology companies must acquire talent equivalent to that in Silicon Valley to succeed.

If you want to build a great startup outside Silicon Valley, finding great talent is all that matters. There are really only three ways to get talent: You can grow it from scratch, you can train it or you can poach it. Your ability to do any of these three — especially the third — is driven largely by your company’s culture.

Grow your own talent

Growing engineering talent from scratch means hiring people straight out of college. In our case, we’ve hired new grads fresh out of CalTech, Cal and Harvard, among others. You get brilliance and high energy, but you still have to build basic work skills. You’ll need to teach recent hires how to communicate with a team in a work environment, and assume they will have limited productivity for three to six months. It’s a tax, but after you pay it, you get top-notch talent trained exactly how you want.

Alternatively, you can retrain software engineers from other domains. Although they don’t know your language, environment, or process, as long as they’re crazy smart, you can teach them all that.

We do this by creating “starter projects,” which are complete projects, each lasting about four weeks, that require use of the entire stack: technology, infrastructure and process. The goal of these projects is for experienced engineers to get their hands dirty with each element that they will use on your products. After a month, the engineers know enough about your technology to join one of your core projects and, on the way, have built something useful.

Beg, borrow — steal!

Another way to get technical talent outside of Silicon Valley is to poach it from larger companies that are in Silicon Valley. Startups have a real advantage here: Big companies tend to get sclerotic. It becomes harder and harder to launch products, there are more politics and hierarchy, and each line of code makes less of a difference.

Thus, the startup advantage: We don’t have enough people to have politics, and everyone has to contribute or the work doesn’t get done. In my experience, great engineers want to know the work they do every day and are often willing to leave their “mother ship” for such an opportunity.

There are, however, two big issues with the poach approach. First, you will have to relocate the engineers. This probably scares some startups that think it is expensive, difficult and time-consuming. We’ve found it’s no more expensive to relocate a great engineer than to pay a recruiter fee to find one, so the cash costs are a wash.

The second — and far more important — issue is that you have to build a culture that is appealing to engineers who might want to leave a big, established (safe) company in the Silicon Valley to come work for you in, say, Hollywood.

Build a culture where engineers matter

Part of what makes the Valley work is that most of the companies are flat, non-hierarchical and communicate openly. Everyone can talk about everything. Although the resulting chattiness is sometimes annoying, engineers want to feel they are involved in the company as a whole, not simply whatever task they are coding.

To entice great engineers to leave their sinecure to come to your risky startup, you have to double down on culture. Engineers have to feel the future of the company depends on them. If they have a bad day, something bad will happen — a feature won’t launch, a sale won’t happen — and, in contrast, when they do well, the company is materially better off.

Your strong, distinctive identity is your corporate culture. Building a culture that engineers want to be a part of will allow you to grow, retrain, or poach the best engineers out there.

Douglas Merrill (@DouglasMerrill) is the CEO and founder of ZestCash, a financial services technology startup committed to serving the needs of the underbanked. He is the former CIO and Vice President of Engineering at Google and author of “Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff Out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right.”

[Image: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via Flickr]

Defcon (named after the old code for nuclear war, or defense condition) is now in its 19th year. It was started in 1993 by Jeff Moss, a hacker also known as Dark Tangent. Defcon began as a party for a visiting Canadian hacker. Now it has become the big hacker event of the year with more than 10,000 attendees. The Defcon conference is anything but corporate. For many years, it was at the downscale Riviera Hotel; this year it moved upscale to the larger Rio Hotel. Defcon is more tolerant of alternative views, such as open support for Anonymous, the hacktivist group that has launched denial of service attacks against major corporations in the wake of corporations turning their backs on Wikileaks and Sony’s battle with hacker Geohot. One attendee said it was impossible to find Guy Fawkes masks anywhere in Las Vegas, since the mask, like the one worn above, is a symbol for Anonymous.

Black Hat, on the other hand, is now 15 years old and draws more than 8,500 attendees to the elegant Caesar’s Palace Hotel. Black Hat has plenty of dramatic moments as the corporate, academic, government and indie hacker cultures mesh and sometimes clash. Plenty of people go to both conferences. But you’ll see more suits at Black Hat and more T-shirts at Defcon. You can pay corporate rates at Black Hat, but at Defcon, they don’t accept credit cards, since hackers do not want to be identified. You have to pay in cash, and attendees are identified as “human,” “goons,” (for staff) and “press.” (Yes, evidently press are not human). There are no names on Defcon badges, which are typically a product of the hacker imagination. I’m killing myself because I forgot to take a picture of the fake automated teller machine at Defcon. But I found it quite ironic that Barnaby Jack, the man who hacked an ATM at Black Hat last year, was now working for the very corporate McAfee Labs, which is owned by Intel.

At Black Hat, the great affairs of the world are discussed with a lot of gravitas. At Defcon, people heckle the speakers and drink beer in the middle of comic presentations. But one of the things they have in common is a growing importance in the world of technology. A few years ago, a CNBC reporter tried to sneak into Defcon to shoot undercover film of hackers — a big no-no at Defcon if you don’t ask permission of those you’re taking images of first. But this year, the media included CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, NPR, the Financial Times — just to name a few.

Black Hat: Joseph “Cofer” Black, a counter-terrorism expert who anticipated the 9/11 attacks, warned Black Hat attendees that they should prepare for cyber war and figure out how to convince people who don’t believe such a war is happening, as happened before 9/11. During his opening keynote at Black Hat, a prankster set off a fire alarm. Black had to finish his talk with the sound of Klaxons going off.

Defcon: Clearly, Defcon had very different vetting rules for speakers compared to the academically peer-reviewed Black Hat. A hacker who goes by Kryptia spoke on a panel about the Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivist groups. He pulled off his mask and said he actually wasn’t speaking for Anonymous. In the audience, there was support for hacktivism, but the panel was divided about how effective the cyber vigilantes had become and whether they have lost their way. The panel debate was itself a theatrical microcosm of the whole problem of identifying members of Anonymous, or LulzSec, and prosecuting them for committing various hacking crimes such as shutting down web sites.

Black Hat: Jeff “Dark Tangent” Moss founded both Black Hat and Defcon. He is now vice president and chief security officer at ICANN, the international body that sets the rules for the internet. He called on corporations to make the internet safer by embracing DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) as a way to reduce misdirection of users to sites with malware. Companies that sign their zone not only protect their own sites and users, they help the rest of the internet, Moss said.

Defcon: Attendees were greeted with this Da Vinci Code-style reality game that required them to solve a variety of mind-bending puzzles. The attendees received pure titanium badges that had a cut-out of the Egyptian mathematical symbol the Eye of Ra, as well as a letter and a number. A hacker who goes by the name “LosT” created the game as a way for hackers to show off their skills.

Black Hat: Cyber espionage can take many imaginative forms. Two security researchers Mike Tassey (left) and Richard Perkins (right) built an unmanned aerial vehicle, loaded it with wireless interception technology, and showed how you can spy on your neighbors or corporations from above.

Defcon: The conference talks weren’t all about politics or pranks. Most of them focused on hardcore security technology where speakers offered proof that they had accomplished the tasks, or hacks, which they claimed they did.

Black Hat: Peiter Zatko is a famous hacker known as Mudge from the early L0pht group. But he crossed into the realm of white hats when he joined the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as program manager for cyber security. In a Black Hat keynote, he announced that the government plans to invest in hundreds of small cyber security projects and companies in order to kickstart security technology. Zatko found that it takes about 125 lines of code to create the typical piece of malware and it takes about 10 million lines of code to create sophisticated technologies to protect against it.

Defcon: These women were marketing, um, a company’s security technology. But the message was meant to cater to the sentiment at Defcon, where sympathy for the cause of Anonymous and its hacktivism was believed to be high. Of course, you never know. They could have been undercover federal agents, who were also plentiful at Defcon.

Black Hat: The talks took place in cavernous ballrooms at Caesar’s Palace. In the overcrowded sessions, security researchers drew enormous applause whenever they figured out something cool that had never been done before.

Defcon: The food at the past venue, the Riviera Hotel, was often horrible. It consisted of hacker food such as pizza, potato chips, hot dogs and chicken strips. But this year, at the Rio, the food was much better, ranging from hand-made chicken burritos to sushi boxes.

Black Hat: Dmitri Alperovitch, the vice president of threat research at McAfee, unmasked a huge five-year cyber espionage campaign called Operation Shady RAT. He said that the operation was likely created by a nation-state and it penetrated the computer networks of 72 governments and major corporations around the world. Many pointed the finger at China, though McAfee did not identify the perpetrator.

Defcon: On sale in the vendor area were skeleton keys and lock picks aimed at getting past any physical barrier. Getting through physical locks or cyber locks both take mental discipline, and they both require skills that are on the edge of legality. Defcon holds an annual lock picking contest, and this year experts opened a $1,300 card-and-code government lock within seconds.

Black Hat: Scores of vendors had their own booths where they sold their services. There were plenty of parties at swanky Vegas venues and a night of parties in suites at Caesar’s Palace.

Black Hat: Not every attendee at Black hat was overtly corporate. David Marcus, director of security research at McAfee, has much more of a Defcon look. He is pictured here at McAfee’s reception, but he got into a heavy conversation at Defcon about the Anonymous hacktivist group. Marcus noted that McAfee recently hired Barnaby Jack, who hacked an ATM last year, to do security research.

Defcon: The vendor area at Defcon targeted “gamers, geeks and hackers.” That’s an increasingly wide swatch of the population these days. We have no picture of the “crowd” at Defcon because that’s a press no-no. Many hackers (and undercover feds) don’t want their pictures taken.

Black Hat: Hackers debated who had the bragging rights for the best way to attack a mobile network. What was the best way to pwn (pronounced pone or own), or trick, the widest number of users. Is it by hacking the infrastructure of the wireless system, the chips within the hardware, the operating system, or the applications themselves? From left to right: Charlie Miller, Ralf-Phillipp Weinman, Nick Depetrillo, and Don Bailey. Much of the talk at Black Hat has shifted to hacking mobile systems; three of them focused on hacking Apple mobile technology.

Defcon: Some talks are approved for comedy alone. This talked, entitled the IPocalypse is a lie, by the fake-named Sterling Archer and Professor Freaksworth (right) dwelt on the shift from Internet Protocol Version 4 to IPv6, which is meant to move beyond the 4 billion internet addresses out there. They made their half-serious case that IPv6 is a global conspiracy.

Black Hat: At the Pwnie awards, companies or hackers received awards for the best or worst accomplishments in security. Among the companies savaged were Sony, which won the Pwnie for the “most epic fail” for its lawsuit against Geohot and failure to protect the 100 million users of its Sony Online Entertainment and PlayStation Network gaming services. And those praised: Geohot, the hacker sued by Sony for circumventing the security of the PlayStation 3, won for the best song, as seen in this YouTube video.

Defcon: In the vendor area, you can buy just about anything that seems like electronic contraband. The WiFi Robber says it can help you secure your wireless network, regain access after losing a password, and “much more.”

Black Hat: Each year, security researcher Dan Kaminsky gives a talk and hands out cookies baked by his 88-year-old grandmother (left). This year, Kaminsky is coding some interesting technology that could propel him into the center of the net neutrality debate. Kaminsky calls his invention Nooter (a contraction of the phrase “neutral router”). It is a sort of lie-detector test for internet service providers (ISPs). Nooter will be able to send traffic along different paths and determine whether or not your ISP is deliberately slowing some of your internet traffic, such as data from file-sharing web sites.

Defcon: If the stereotype of a hacker is someone with a Mohawk hair cut, you might as well live up to it. The stylists at Defcon were quite busy this year.

Black Hat: Uh, there’s a naked guy in the middle of Caesar’s Palace. (Yes, it’s a replica of Michelangelo’s David). It’s pretty majestic compared to the Chippendale’s club at the Rio, where Defcon is held.

Defcon: Lots of businesses are moving to cloud computing, where they operate their services in data centers hosted by big companies. But Ramon Gomez, a security professional at a hosting provider, sounded the alarm and said that vendors should do a better job of telling users when large numbers of them are suffering the same kinds of problems or attacks. Sometimes it takes nine hours to get a response from a cloud services vendor about a cyber attack, Gomez said.

Black Hat: Philippe Courtot started Qualys a decade ago to focus on cloud security. At first, people ridiculed the idea but now it is fashionable to hire security-as-a-service such as what Qualys offers to 5,500 corporations and governments. Qualys announced a number of new services and features at the show.

Defcon: Gulp. Don’t get caught on the Wall of Sheep. That is the wall where the names of users, their partial passwords, and devices are listed after they have been hacked at Defcon, via the WiFi network or Bluetooth connections.

Black Hat: Jerome Radcliffe, a diabetic and a security researcher, showed how he figured out how to hack into an insulin pump for diabetics. The process was far too easy, as there was almost no security built into the device. Brad Smith, another security tech expert and a registered nurse, said that the problem of medical device hacking has been around for a long time. He said, “It’s just not his insulin pump. It’s also in other devices.” Smith said the history of these devices is a “litany of disaster” when it comes to security.

Defcon: Among the competitions held every year is Capture the Flag, where teams of hackers are sent on missions to attack the security of major corporations. And every year, they succeed with a large number of penetrations.

Black Hat: Security researcher Charlie Miller takes a second to think during his demo of hacking a battery for a MacBook laptop. Miller hasn’t figured out how to make a battery explode, but he did learn how to brick a battery from afar.

Defcon: You could buy this rug at the vendor faire at Defcon. While the show is for hackers, the presence of federal agents is always felt. At the federal agents panel, the government agencies made light of the undercover nature of their work with a “Spot the Fed” contest. Four women went up on stage and the audience members had to guess which one was a federal agent. Only two of four contestants got the guesses right.

Black Hat: The conference drew more than 8,500 attendees in its 15th year.

Defcon: I didn’t actually see anyone hacking naked at Defcon, but there were definitely people wearing this shirt.

Defcon: Steven Levy gave a talk about early hacker culture based on the first book on hackers, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, published in 1984. In his talk, he said tha the spirit of hacking — built on the idea that information should be free — is still alive at many corporations such as Facebook and Google. Maybe in that respect, Black Hat and Defcon aren’t so different after all.

That’s a big switch, considering most of the Taliban didn’t use modern technology  — from televisions to music players — when they ruled Afghanistan. But Osama bin Laden’s own use of thumb drives to mask the location of his computer and his hideout show that technology knows no boundaries. In fact, it is a little surprising how long it has taken for the Taliban to tweet.

Their Twitter feed is @alemarahweb and it generates several messages day to 2,206 followers. Most of the messages are in Pashtu, but some are coming out in English now. The latest message: “13 enemy personal killed as Afghan police officer opens fire, several wounded: Helmand…”

Notable, the Taliban Twitter account is following @afghanHeroesUK, a charity supporting British troops in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t say that Twitter is a weapon. But it is a little jarring to see how close technology can bring together the combatants on different sides of a war. No doubt President Obama could follow the Taliban now, and vice versa.

[photo credit: topnews]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

(Editor’s note: Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur and the founder and CTO of HubSpot, which provides marketing software for small businesses. This column originally appeared on his blog. )

If you have time to read one document on the topic of startup culture, you should read through the NetFlix “culture deck” (embedded below).  If you have time for two, read through the NetFlix deck twice — it’s that good.  It is so good, in fact, that I’m surprised when I come across entrepreneurs that haven’t seen the deck yet.  These are people that read all sorts of great material on the web to help their startups.

So, as a public service, I’m sharing with you the best presentation on startup culture I’ve ever seen (including one we’ve created ourselves at HubSpot).

Insights From The NetFlix Startup Culture Presentation

These are just some of the points that jumped out at me.  I’m sure you’ll have your favorite parts too.

1. Comes right out and says who the “freedoms and responsibilities” applies to:  In their case, salaried employees only.

2. Lots of companies have nice sounding values, but real values are defined by who gets rewarded and who gets let go.

3. You can articulate what you are, and are not trying to do.

4. You can separate what must be done well now, and what can be improved later.

5. You treat people with respect, independent of their status.

6. You accomplish amazing amounts of important work.

7. You focus on great results, rather than process.

8. You have a bias-to-action and avoid “analysis paralysis”

9. You create new ideas that prove useful.

10. You find the time to simplify so you can stay nimble.

11. You are quick to admit mistakes.

12. We’re a team, not a family.

13. A great workplace is stunning colleagues.

14. You behave like an owner of the company.

15. Prevent irrevocable disaster.

16. “There’s no clothing policy at NetFlix, but no one has come work to naked lately.”

17. Act in the company’s best interests.

18. Flexibility is more important than efficiency in the long term.

19. The best managers focus on context rather than control.

20. Titles are not very helpful.

21. Compensation should be about external market value, not internal parity.

22. In some groups, there may not be enough growth opportunity for everyone.

23. Individuals should manage their career paths — not the company.

Which ones do you like?  What did you like that you would have included?  Which parts of the presentation do you disagree with?