Hey Saulians,
First off - I have a little pandemic-era side-project that has come to fruition that I’ve been meaning to announce here.
I’ve been following a lot of great community members from Fooldom on Twitter for a while (along with plenty of Fool advisors and the Gardners). And I’ve watched as Joe/Stocknovice and Austin/Flieberman and Richard/Digized have become great fintwit (Financial Twitter) citizens full of great knowledge and insights, and each also has their own ways of publishing longer content.
I have been decided to follow their leads on both of those fronts. The important one is that I am going to move my long-form writings to a way better medium geared for that - a blog. But I also aim to have a strong presence on the Twitters to follow along those same trends. So join me in these places if you’d like to keep reading up on the tech platforms behind today’s SaaS hypergrowth stocks.
Blog: https://hhhypergrowth.substack.com/p/welcome
Twitter: @hhhypergrowth
As I noted in my welcome post linked above: Unfortunately, The Motley Fool forums are antiquated. While they are great for the every day banter amongst contributors, they are difficult for the writing format I prefer. So, that, dear reader, leads you why I created this new site; I am bringing my long-form writings to a better platform. Here you will find my technical deep dives into SaaS technologies, sprinkled heavily with my investment research into execution and finances.
So I’m going to split my contributions up a bit. I will continue posting the earnings reports to this board, plus the bits of research and news, but when that research builds into longer-form pieces, those are heading to the blog. Oh, I cannot tell you the joy of being able to embed images and some simple formatting! A writer’s paradise! I back-filled the blog with a lot of the posts you’ve already seen over the past year on Okta, Crowdstrike, Datadog, and Cloudflare, and am just starting to put new content up.
Anyhow, I will try to find a good balance of letting the board know when I post something of high interest there (plus I’m sure others will, like Rafe did a few posts back), or you can go sign up and get it emailed directly to you.
As an example of the WIN-WIN I hope for in this endeavor, but also why I like my new blogging platform… here was my post on AYX’s quarter on Saul’s board: https://discussion.fool.com/alteryx-q120-and-its-new-apa-platfor… that you can compare to the blog post that spun from it: https://hhhypergrowth.substack.com/p/an-alteryx-platform-rev… (Look at those inline images! and formatting! and embedded links!)
So I’m enjoying it. But know that I’m not going anywhere; I’ll still be contributing on this board on a regular basis. Even though Saul stole back his Top Recommended Fool crown.
Anyhow there have been some high profile fumbles lately - Twitter was hacked, and today Cloudflare had a major outage.
So I wrote up some bits on each…
1. The Age of Hacking
https://hhhypergrowth.substack.com/p/the-age-of-hacking
The Twitter hack was ultimately discovered to be done via social engineering, so I dive into that to explain it, as well as discuss a new partnership from Okta, Crowdstrike and others that directly addresses that security concern.
Security remains extremely important, now more than ever! If you are remember this bit of mine from my Okta Business at Work (at Home) 2020 report in May…
https://discussion.fool.com/pandemic-home-work-34506613.aspx
- They report a 667% increase in phishing attacks in March over Feb. Cybersecurity EDUCATION is also really important. Proofpoint is doing quite well, but especially their employee training division. First line of defense is making your employees aware of the dangers, and how to increase awareness enough to learn to identify attacks.
2. Cloudflare Outage
I had a tweet storm (barrage of tweets… which I probably should have made into a blog post…) about the Cloudflare (NET) outage. Here’s the tweets as a single post: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1284345898156335105.html
Not good to have such public mistakes that can have an impact on a major portion of the internet. But I was incredibly impressed by Cloudflare’s response after their royal muck-up.
First off, it wasn’t a hack, which would NOT be good news for a company that just pivoted into cybersecurity space. And luckily, mistakes don’t last long in the public mind. But this outage gave a great glimpse into their incident response capabilities. They identified and solved the problem in 23 minutes. And in doing so, came out the other end a stronger edge network. They were very open about what happened, and really impressed me.
-muji
long OKTA, CRWD and NET still