The a16z Show · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Barrett Lyon mentioned a book about his early work, which details his efforts to track down and pursue aggressive Russian cybercriminals involved in extortion and client-side attacks. The book covers incidents where businesses suffered significant losses, particularly during peak sales seasons, and Lyon's team's attempts to bring these criminals to justice, including a trip to Moscow.
“And recently, so I have an AI-powered webcam that watches boats in Miami. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's 24 hours a day. It's been up for almost a year now. And it's got a little chat community of people on there. And one of them figured out who I was. And then the other day, they're like, I just finished reading the book about you. I'm like, what?”
“Oh, it's been so long. I think the beginnings of Prolexic and tracking down these cyber criminals in Russia. And specifically these guys, there was like a couple of them, were extremely aggressive, extorting and damaging a lot of our clients.”
“And so we just kind of had enough of it and said, this has got to end. I mean, we had Christmases destroyed because we were just dealing with customers and network outages.”