Interview with Steve Herrod – General Catalyst Partners

General Catalyst PartnersGeneral Catalyst Partners, Interview with Steve Herrod
Date: 16 February 2015
General Catalyst Partners Crunchbase profile

Recently I had the great honor and pleasure to speak with Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst partners. Before entering the VC world, Steve enjoyed an impressive 12-year long career at VMware where he held various technical leadership roles and left as CTO.

I had a very forthright talk with Steve, no marketing speak or any rehearsed answers. To reflect the open nature of our chat, I left the transcription largely un-edited.

Steve-HerrodI spoke to Steve about developments in the market and his investmentfocus at General Catalyst partners. Specifically we discussed the trend towards Mobile, Mobile payment and the increased scarcity in developer talent.
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Hillview Technologies endpoint security

Hillview TechnologiesHillview Technologies, interview with Marios Leventopoulos
Date: 15 February 2014
Hillview Technologies Website

Employees are expecting ever increasing flexibility with regards to how they work, both in terms of mobility and range of devices. This poses an interesting security challenge for the Corporate IT department. Giving devices open access to uncontrolled networks makes them highly vulnerable.

Arguably the largest risk for endpoint devices like phones, laptops and tablets to get infected is website access through your browser. Malicious code can run on your endpoint through your browser, affecting your entire device, the files on it and potentially the network that the device is brought into.
Hillview technologies intro

Enter Hillview Technologies. They have developed a service that protects all endpoint devices from getting infected by malignant code running on websites.

Hillview effectively creates a proxy-based security buffer between the browser on your endpoint and the actual website you visit, so that no code – malignant or benign – ever runs on your device.

For a bit of background, Hillview Technologies is a VMware security spinout. I spoke with the VP of Engineering Marios Leventopoulos who ran me through their product and company history.
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