Why The Chainsmokers Invest in—and Party With—Niche Cybersecurity Companies
Why The Chainsmokers Invest in—and Party With—Niche Cybersecurity Companies On Saturday, with Hurricane Hilary looming, Alex Pall and Drew Taggart of the DJ duo The Chainsmokers performed a concert at Los Angeles State Historic Park that set an all-time attendance record for the venue. By Tuesday night, Pall was in Switzerland, speaking to WIRED on Zoom, but he had a different recent event on his mind: his and Taggart's first-ever trip earlier this month to the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. On top of being DJs and electronic music producers, The Chainsmokers are also active tech investors. They founded a venture firm, Mantis VC, in 2019 with two other entrepreneurs and now have investments in a broad portfolio of fintech, machine learning , ecommerce, gaming, and healthcare startups. And though Mantis doesn't specifically focus on cybersecurity, the firm is starting to develop a reputation for identifying startups that are attempting to address esoteric yet crit...