Lunch Links - April 9th, 2014

"Heartbleed" is a vulnerability bug in OpenSSL, the most popular opensource cryptographic library

By now you've probably heard of "Heartbleed", a bug in OpenSSL's implementation of the transport layer security protocols heartbeat extension.  The vulnerability was discovered by Google Security's Neel Mehta, and a full explanation of the bug is available here.

A fix has already been provided, so at the moment there is a race against the clock to implement the changes before they can be exploited.  Techcrunch wrote a piece about what Bitcoin users need to know about Heartbleed:

In short, update everything that touches your Bitcoin and don’t trust exchanges that haven’t explicitly explained their position on the exploit. Want more bad news? You should assume that all your usernames and passwords used over the past two years are compromised. This means you should change everything, not just your bitcoin data. A clever hacker could socially engineer her way into your wallet simply by knowing a few things about your online habits.

Major Moves

The Flatiron School, a coding academy in NYC, raised $5.5M in a Series A round of funding led by Charles River Ventures.  The two-year-old for-profit school will set you back between $10k and $12k for a course, but offers discounts for accepting a job offer through their own job network.  In exchange, the School pockets a hiring commission equal to 15% of the student's first-year base salary, according to their current hiring agreement:

Flatiron School Hiring Agreement

 As a Hiring Partner, you agree to pay a hiring commission equivalent to 15% of the student's first-year base salary. We've decided to structure our program in this way for two reasons: 

1. Charging employers a placement fee allows us to keep tuition as low as possible. 

2. Education today is too expensive and not focused on real results. By basing our revenue model on job placement, we are aligning our interests with those of our students. If we're not successful in training students for jobs, we shouldn't be financially successful, either.

Bay-area Q&A site Quora raised $80M in Series C funding to fund its international expansion.  The round was led by Tiger Global Management and sets Quora's valuation near $900M.  Quora is still revenue-less, but according to co-founder/CEO Adam D'Angelo, it plans on introducing its first keyword ads next year.


Personal Blogs

"Gotham Gal" Joanne Wilson pens a short piece on the importance of crafting your pitch deck:

A pitch deck tells the story of your business.  I have read enough pitch decks at this point that I should be able to open one and by page 3 if not 2 get the basis of the business.  When I get decks that are over 12 pages I find them hard to finish.  It should be bold and to the point.  Even 12 pages should not take very long to read.

I always stress the importance of redoing your deck several times.  It is no different than writing your business plan.  Putting information down on some kind of format makes it clear to you what is rambling around your brain is clear to others.  It is an opportunity for possible investors or even senior hires to get excited.

Instapaper-founder Marco Arment explains how to test your vulnerability to the OpenSSL bug known as "Heartbleed":

Test your vulnerability with Heartbleeder. It’s pretty shocking how many services, including many hosted by cloud providers that manage this for them, are still vulnerable a day after most Linux distributions had patches available — part of the problem is that this will also affect any load-balancer or other hardware that decrypts SSL for you before proxying unencrypted traffic to your webservers.

Marketer Seth Godin uses a string metaphor to describe the evolution of how we find new ideas:

Ideas used to be nicely wrapped up, wrapped in movies or books or some other sort of container. The Harvard Business Review and Fast Company would collect a bunch of them in one handy, easy to carry package. And the way we found those ideas was by going to the place where the containers lived and grabbing one. The bookstore was a valuable showroom for worthy ideas.

Today, ideas spread. We find them from someone we trust, or as they flash across the sky of social media. Today, people with authority and leverage continue to need new and important ideas, but there isn't an obvious idea store to go and pick up the next one. Instead, we listen to the pulse of what's going on around us, and see who is talking about what.