In Progress By Aviatrix

Aviatrix

In Progress By Aviatrix features candid, unscripted conversations between Doug Merritt and provocative guests from business, government, and security. No scripts. No product pitches. Just frank and open dialogue about leadership, decision-making, and the realities of building organizations--naturally with some insights about the state of cybersecurity today. Designed to give you inspiration for your own career, role, and leadership execution. In Progress: because nothing worth building is ever finished. And that's not a flaw. That's the point. New episodes biweekly on LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Episodes

  1. 5d ago

    Nick Reva: Assume Containment, Not Breach

    Nick Reva's path to becoming Global Director of Engineering Security at DoorDash started with a high schooler's curiosity about getting around network restrictions to reach Napster — a rabbit hole that turned into a career spanning Wrigley, PwC, SpaceX, and Snap, where he went from analyst to Snap's 32nd security hire and eventually turned what he learned into a Udacity course on cloud-native security and an upcoming book. In this episode of In Progress, Nick and Doug dig into why "assume breach" might be the wrong mindset for the cloud era, what it actually takes to build guardrails developers will use without a fight, and how Elon Musk's first-principles thinking reshaped the way Nick leads security teams — a conversation about engineering discipline, practical risk management, and why a cracked-open window in your cloud environment might matter more than the breach itself. Key takeaways:   Why Nick argues the industry should shift from "assume breach" to "assume containment" — and what that changes about incident response The guardrails-not-gates philosophy that lets developers move fast without becoming security experts How Nick's team found a workable path through an "impossible" secure-SDLC mandate on SpaceX's Falcon codebase Applying Elon Musk's first-principles reasoning to break security problems down to their core "whys" Why Nick sees cloud security footholds as a societal and economic risk, not just a technical one

  2. Jul 8

    Chris Hughes: Not Prevention, But Resiliency

    In the inaugural episode of In Progress, Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt talks with Chris Hughes — CISA Cyber Innovation Fellow, author of Software Transparency, Effective Vulnerability Management, and Securing AI Agents, and founder of Resilient Cyber — about the forces reshaping security: exponential CVE growth, AI as both attacker and defender, the limits of "human in the loop," and why resilience now matters more than prevention. Key Takeaways: CVEs are exploding — over 40,000 in 2025, with 2026 projections near 60,000 (some estimates up to 100,000) — while AI makes vulnerabilities easier to find and exploit.Patching capacity has long lagged below 10% of the backlog; broken production risk and competing business priorities keep it there.Security should shift from trying to prevent every incident to containing and recovering from the ones that happen."Human in the loop" doesn't scale against AI-driven attack volume — defenders need to fight AI with AI.Security teams that act as collaborators, not blockers, avoid the shadow-IT workarounds that punitive policies create.

  • 2 Episodes

About

In Progress By Aviatrix features candid, unscripted conversations between Doug Merritt and provocative guests from business, government, and security. No scripts. No product pitches. Just frank and open dialogue about leadership, decision-making, and the realities of building organizations--naturally with some insights about the state of cybersecurity today. Designed to give you inspiration for your own career, role, and leadership execution. In Progress: because nothing worth building is ever finished. And that's not a flaw. That's the point. New episodes biweekly on LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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