How did The Chainsmokers get interested in digital privacy, incident response, software supply chain security, and anti-spyware tools?

 How did The Chainsmokers get interested in digital privacy, incident response, software supply chain security, and anti-spyware tools? 

And how did Pall, a celebrity DJ who performs all over the world, end up partying at Black Hat? He broke it down for us. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: I'm super curious, where does the security and privacy specialization come from?

Alex Pall: I gotta give credit to Saveena [Mandadi, a Mantis investor and director of operations] who's definitely the leader of that space for us. She's done a terrific job building out our thesis around the space. But going back a little bit further, you look at our portfolio, and it probably seems a bit out of character for how you would imagine two musicians to be investing their time and money. And that was very much intentional. 

When you're an artist with a platform like ours, you're getting sought out for two things: distribution and marketing—consumer-related brands or creator, economy, and social. But a few years into it, we were reading the news, and you can't help but take a second look at your portfolio and be like, why are we not in companies like Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike? And it dawned on us that we were kind of falling victim to the consumer space in a way. We wanted to go out and invest in tools that, behind the scenes, could be the things powering society. And it was also just a challenge at first, like maybe we can be some of the first artists to show what kind of value we could bring outside of the typical ecosystem you'd imagine us investing into.