The a16z Show · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Barrett Lyon discussed how his early experiences with cyberattacks on his own servers in high school led him to develop DDoS mitigation techniques. This expertise eventually formed the basis for companies like Prolexic (now Akamai Prolexic) and DefenseNet (which became F5 Silverline), pioneering early cloud-based security services.
“In high school, people were attacking my servers. And so we had to figure out better ways to protect them and techniques and tricks and all the different things you need to do to survive a DDoS attack.”
“And I started writing kind of my list of what you would do to survive. And then somehow I presented that at SANS. And then it got in Google. And then people started calling me.”
“And so I built a whole company to protect businesses from these attacks. And the way I looked at it is like you need big scale. You need to have the biggest, most expensive stuff and not everyone could afford that. So we'll turn that into kind of a leased service as one of the first cloud services to exist.”