Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ondrej Vlcek, CEO of Avast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you one last question. As you’re sitting in your vantage point, what are some open problems that you could point new entrepreneurs to go try to solve? Ondrej Vlcek: We only scratched the surface of AI. AI is obvious. Many of the jobs that we have today will become

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ondrej Vlcek, CEO of Avast (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else do you want to highlight in this conversation? Ondrej Vlcek: I saw the article that you wrote about three years ago when you were interviewing our previous CEO. That was a pretty thorough interview on various parts of our history. This was written four years ago. Maybe it will be good

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ondrej Vlcek, CEO of Avast (Part 3)

Ondrej Vlcek: To do security properly is not cheap. All these vendors might be creating great coffee makers or toasters, but they have no experience in building software. What they typically do is reuse something that is publicly available and hire some people. The end product is very poor when it comes to security quality.

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ondrej Vlcek, CEO of Avast (Part 2)

Ondrej Vlcek: There’s also something called spear-phishing. Spear-phishing is targeted phishing that is sent to a specific individual with a handcrafted individual which includes details from the personal life of the person or some kind of project or product that person is working on. It could also be something that makes the entire message much

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ondrej Vlcek, CEO of Avast (Part 1)

In this edition of the TLCS interview series, we discuss the immense vulnerabilities in B2C security. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience briefly to Avast. We’ve covered the company before and we’ll put that in context. From your perspective, do provide a little bit of summary and also a bit about yourself.

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to find people with experience in Prague? Vince Steckler: Not too successfully. For the most part, what we did was transplant people. For example, I brought over my old deputy from Symantec to run sales. He ran sales out of Prague for two or three years and groomed one of

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Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to cater to all that from Prague? Vince Steckler: Both from Prague and the community. Prague is very cosmopolitan. We can do a lot of support and customization but what’s most important is the community. Most users don’t realize where the company is from. Brazilians tend to think the company

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Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me how you got there. Vince Steckler: It’s basically a few things. When the company went into France, we started at the community side. The competition in France at that time had English language products, which doesn’t really go very real well in France. So we built a French language product. Since

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