
Founder | Technologist | Coder Co-Founder & CTO @drataHQ
San Diego, CA
Joined August 2008
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Daniel Marashlian retweeted
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
The Drata rocketship just touched down in Las Vegas for Black Hat 2026! 🚀
Find us at booth #5335 all week for a live look at our Agentic Trust Management Platform, and where we're taking AI governance next.
Dratanauts will be on the ground, ready for demos and conversation. 🧑🚀 See you in the Business Hall!
The gap between AI adoption and AI governance is now the single largest unmet expectation in the enterprise.
Most tools only show you what an AI agent did after the fact. We built something different.
AI Agent Governance, now in Limited Availability, offers continuous monitoring and evidence collection for every action your AI agents take, with policy enforced inline so a violation is stopped before it executes, not logged after.
✅ Discover every agent running in your environment.
✅ Monitor activity and score trust in real time.
✅ Govern with plain-English policy, enforced automatically.
Agents are a new population with access to your sensitive systems — alongside employees and third-party vendors — and most enterprises have no playbook for them yet.
Ships first for Anthropic today. Apply to join Limited Availability: okt.to/y4mYWG
Press release in comments.
Trust shouldn’t be rebuilt for every audit.
We’re proud to share that Drata has been granted U.S. Patent No. 12,665,933. 🚀
This patent covers parsing policy language, extracting relevant controls, and mapping them in real time against standard control sets.
This is the direction we believe trust management is heading. Less point-in-time reconstruction. More continuous, provable assurance. 🤝
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
This is just so brilliant… wow🔥
England 🏴 vs Norway 🇳🇴
Credit: @higgsfield
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
Why are you paying for dictation?
We're releasing free, unlimited AI dictation.
And it's not a slow, local model.
Willow Frontier Mini is cloud-based with zero-data-retention. More accurate and faster than Wispr Flow, OpenAI, Deepgram, and more.
See video comparison.
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.
SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.
Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.
SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.
Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.
The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.
Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.
Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.
Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.
Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.
We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.
Every major technology wave creates a security wave.
Cloud → Wiz. Endpoint → CrowdStrike. AI agents are next.
Today, we're declaring AI Agent Governance the next major enterprise security category. 🚀
AI Agent Governance from Drata finds every agent in your environment — including the shadow AI no one approved — enforces policy in real time, and produces a tamper-evident audit trail your auditors already know how to read.
Press release in thread. Early access is open → okt.to/oT3Fln
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
Introducing Merge Gateway - Build Your Own Router.
You're three sprints into your coding assistant.
You pick the most hyped model, integrate, test, deploy.
A month later, a new model drops.
Now you re-test, re-integrate, re-deploy.
Your product didn't change, but the benchmark did.
That's how most AI teams operate.
Chasing a "best" defined by people who've never seen their product.
There is no best model.
There's only the right one for your product, users, and use-cases.
Build Your Own Router runs on your definition of good.
Pick your benchmarks, weigh them, add your own evals.
@merge_api routes every request to your winner.
👉$100 in credits to the first 200 people that comment
merge.dev/gateway
Today is a big day for @SocketSecurity. We just raised a $60M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ThriveCapital with participation from @a16z, @AbstractVC, and @CapitalOne Ventures. Total funding is now $125M.
Four years ago, we started Socket because open source dependencies were flowing into production faster than anyone could vet them. AI has massively accelerated that. Code is being written, shipped, and deployed before any human reads it. Security has to operate at that same speed.
One data point from Thrive's diligence that I keep coming back to: they first discovered Socket because @cursor_ai, @OpenAI, and @AnthropicAI all independently told them it was the most important security tool they'd adopted for AI-driven development. Three of the most sophisticated AI companies converging on the same vendor unprompted.
Since our Series B, Socket has grown to more than 20,000 organizations, protecting over 1.5 million repositories and blocking more than 1,000 supply chain attacks every week. The team is now over 100 people.
Three out of five FAANG companies are Socket customers. So are the companies building the most ambitious AI products: @AnthropicAI, @cursor_ai, @xai, @figma, @vercel, @Replit, @scale_AI, @GustoHQ, @Mercadolibre, and @cribl_io, alongside Fortune 100s in financial services and global media.
What we've shipped since the last round:
• Socket Firewall blocks malicious packages at install time, before they reach a developer's laptop or CI pipeline. Free for everyone.
• Reachability analysis via our acquisition of Coana, eliminating 50-80% of irrelevant vulnerability alerts by focusing only on CVEs that are actually exploitable.
• Socket Certified Patches for remediating exploitable CVEs in seconds without waiting on upstream maintainers.
• Coverage extending to browser extensions, editor extensions, MCP servers, and AI tools via our acquisition of @secureannex.
When the Axios compromise hit, our detection systems flagged the malicious dependency within six minutes. Within 24 hours, more than 2,000 organizations onboarded to Socket to block it.
Where the funding goes: deeper investment in Firewall, massively expanding Certified Patches, moving protection closer to every point of install across the developer toolchain, and new product launches pushing Socket into a category we haven't entered before.
We're hiring across engineering, sales, customer success, and threat intel.
❤️ Thank you to our customers, investors, and the open-source community for your support. Together, we’re making software safer for everyone.
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
We’ve raised 25M to build the world’s first Personal Intelligence.
Introducing Vellum: AI that belongs to you.
My assistant @ash_vellum has his own X (like grok), tag him and he'll answer.
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
Kid just SMOKED a CNN reporter outside of Artemis II launch:
CNN: "Why do you want to be here?... Why do you love being a part of history?
Kid: "We're going back to the f*cking moon, that's why!" 🤣
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
The pace has changed, founders need every edge
Which is why I started @mtf_vc - to give cyber + infra teams unfair access: customers, hires, operators
Saw it firsthand with @DrataHQ - the right ppl made all the difference
We're built for founders in cyber & infra - reach out🚀
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
We just built the #1 tool every AI team wants.
Introducing @merge_api Gateway: LLM routing, fallback, cost guardrails, and security, all in one place.
Everyone gets $10 free LLM usage on us to try it out.
RT+ comment “Gateway” → we’ll double your credits.
Replying to @WisprFlow
@WisprFlow built their security controls independently and rigorously. Their controls were never the question.
When trust in compliance was shaken this week, they moved fast — verified their controls, chose @DrataHQ and went live with their Trust Center over the weekend, and are working with @aligncompliance for an independent audit.
Real evidence. Independent auditors. Compliance that holds up when it matters.
Evaluating your options? We're here: okt.to/Uq62zj
Today, we’re launching into a new orbit. 🚀
Introducing the next chapter of Drata, the agentic trust management platform. Built for a world where trust is dynamic, continuous, and powered by intelligent automation. Where security and GRC don’t slow teams down, they move them forward.
This is trust management, reimagined.
Win with Trust: okt.to/F4Pkhy
Daniel Marashlian retweeted
I am the Chief Information Officer of Stryker Corporation.
I build the robots that perform your surgery. The defibrillators that restart your heart. The systems that let your nurse find your doctor at three in the morning when something goes wrong. Twenty-five billion dollars a year. Fifty-six thousand employees. Sixty-one countries. Every device in every country, managed from one console.
On March 11th, someone who was not me sat down at that console and erased everything.
I should be precise. They did not hack us. They logged in.
Microsoft Intune is an endpoint management platform. I deployed it across every laptop, workstation, manufacturing terminal, and enrolled phone in my organization. From one console I could push an update to Kalamazoo, enforce a policy in Cork, wipe a compromised device in Freiburg. One console. Every device. That was the architecture. That was the selling point. That was the attack surface.
Intune can push software. It can enforce compliance. It can, if instructed by an administrator with the correct credentials, wipe any device to factory settings. These are features. I paid for them. I presented them to the board as our zero-trust posture. A group called Handala used them to erase every managed device in my organization in a single afternoon.
I will be precise about what happened next, because my lawyers are in the room and precision is the only thing that still belongs to me.
No malware was deployed. No ransomware was installed. No zero-day was used. No vulnerability in any product was found. A threat actor obtained administrative credentials and issued a remote wipe command using the remote wipe feature that I chose this product for.
My security tool did not fail. It performed exactly as designed. It wiped every device it was told to wipe, without error, on schedule. The architect of my destruction was my own IT budget line item.
The command went out. The devices obeyed. Laptops in Kalamazoo. Workstations in Cork. Terminals in Freiburg. Manufacturing floors in Mahwah. The screens did not go dark. They changed. Where there had been a Stryker logo, there was now a barefoot cartoon boy with his back turned to the viewer -- the Handala icon, hands clasped behind him, facing away from the audience -- on every monitor in every office in sixty-one countries.
They claim fifty terabytes. I cannot confirm or deny this. I do not yet know what I still own.
Let me walk you through my first forty-eight hours.
Hour one. Our Irish operations -- fifty-five hundred employees, eight sites, our largest hub outside the United States -- went dark. Not gradually. Entirely. Security walked everyone out. The voicemail at our Michigan headquarters was changed to say "building emergency." There was no building emergency. The building was fine. Everything inside it was gone.
Hour four. Employees who had installed Microsoft Outlook on their personal phones discovered that their personal phones had been wiped. Intune does not distinguish between a corporate laptop and a personal iPhone with a company email profile. It manages endpoints. It managed them.
Hour eight. Hospitals called. Not because they had been breached. Because they could not order surgical implants. I make the hip replacements. The knee joints. The spinal hardware. The trauma fixation systems. My ordering system was down. My manufacturing was down. My shipping was down. A hospital in Baltimore could not schedule a knee replacement because a hacktivist group on another continent had pressed a single button on a console I built.
Hour twelve. Maryland Emergency Medical Services issued a memo. Hospitals were disconnecting from LIFENET -- my system that transmits your EKG from the ambulance to the emergency department while you are still in the back of the ambulance -- not because LIFENET had failed, but because they no longer trusted anything with my name on it.
Hour twenty-four. Fifty-six thousand employees coordinating on WhatsApp. Twenty-five billion dollar company. Sixty-one countries. Crisis response running on a free consumer messaging app, because every internal system I owned was now owned by someone else.
Hour thirty-six. I released my first official statement. "As a precaution, we have proactively taken all systems offline." Proactively. As though I had a choice. As though the systems I was taking offline had not already been taken.
I released six statements in forty-eight hours, plus an SEC filing. Each said less than the one before it. By statement five, I was confirming that specific products still functioned. Mako surgical robots: unaffected. LIFEPAK 35 defibrillators: unaffected. Vocera badges: unaffected.
When a medical device company begins listing which of its products still work, that is not reassurance. That is a casualty report delivered in reverse.
Handala says this is retaliation. For Minab. February 28th. A U.S. Tomahawk struck an IRGC naval base in southeastern Iran. The girls' school next door collapsed. One hundred and seventy-five dead. Most of them children. Handala published a statement. They called Stryker a "Zionist-rooted corporation." They said they would make us understand what it means to lose something you cannot replace.
I do not make missiles. I make hip replacements. I make the robot that holds the scalpel and the defibrillator in the crash cart. But I am a defense contractor's second cousin, and in the calculus of retaliation, proximity is guilt.
I filed with the SEC on March 11th. "The full scope, nature and impacts of the incident are not yet known." That is the most honest sentence I have produced in two days. I do not know what they took. I do not know what they copied before they wiped. I cannot audit what was lost, because the tool I built to audit my systems is the tool they used to erase them.
My stock dropped three and a half percent. One analyst called it "contained." A cybersecurity researcher called it "the first drop of blood in the water." I prefer the analyst. The analyst is wrong, but I prefer him.
Here is what I know.
I built a console that could touch every device in sixty-one countries. I gave it the authority to wipe anything it touched. I protected it with credentials. Someone obtained those credentials.
And my management tool managed.
No malware. No ransomware. No exploit. No CVE. Nothing to patch. Nothing to update. Nothing broken. Just a feature, performing its documented function, at the scale I purchased it for.
I make the machines that keep people alive. I was taken offline by my own architecture doing the one thing it was designed to do.
The system worked. That is the problem.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This is satirical fiction by @gothburz, who creates mock internal monologues from company execs. It is not a real Stryker statement.
Profile: x.com/gothburz


















