EP 16 - Panther Labs’s Joren McReynolds: Developing Security Products that Can Scale

What does it take to shape an early-stage security project into a product that solves real problems? 

Understanding your customers is a key first step. Knowing the personas who can use your product and the leverage they can get out of it, it's what ultimately brings value to security teams and even other teams that can seize their benefits.

We had a great conversation with Joren McReynolds who is the VP of Engineering, IT and Security at Panther Labs. In today's episode he shares the experiences and lessons over the course of his journey at Facebook, Airbnb, and how they shaped his knowledge on what building a great product takes.

Topics discussed:

- What led to the creation of osquery and why open source.

- What the progression was to build that as an MVP.

- Joren's approach to building the IR Team at Airbnb.

- How different Airbnb's cloud-based environment was from Facebook's.

- How Joren's past experience at Facebook influenced his work at Airbnb.

- Joren’s thought process around implementing security monitoring.

- What inspired StreamAlert.

- 3 pieces of actionable advice to security teams looking to excel in detection at scale.