What do you do at DodgeBall, and what do you build with your team?
I am a co-founder of Dodgeball and serve as CTO, meaning my role is to take on potentially any task, though I specialize in technology.
Dodgeball is a trust and safety orchestration platform. Employing a variety of the latest technologies, including machine learning and no-code automation, we are able to power end-to-end fraud prevention and customer trust operations. We offer trust and safety teams understanding of the real pulse of their operations, additional control, and insight. All while capturing previously lost revenue and delivering a great customer experience.
What are some of the distinctive features of DodgeBall that differentiate you from your competitors?
Dodgeball combines signals from a variety of sources, including customer data stores and external integrations such as payment processors, data enrichment services, and fraud engines to name a few categories. Using AI and all of the signals available, Dodgeball generates a unified customer history providing a single view of their interactions and behavior enabling trust and safety teams to make faster and better decisions. Dodgeball also features a no-code automation builder for orchestrating trust and safety workflows. By creating decisioning logic in Dodgeball, trust and safety teams are further decoupled from development constraints that have historically led to slower responses to emerging threats as systems grow and become more complex. The time between incident and response has a severe impact on revenue lost to both fraud and false declines. Allowing trust and safety teams to adjust decisioning logic in near real-time to respond to observed threats means less loss, higher revenue, and a better customer experience.
Can you give us a sneak peek into some of the upcoming product upgrades that your customers can look forward to?
Dodgeball is pre-launch. We are looking for early-access partners who are currently experiencing issues with trust and safety on their platforms. Please reach out through our website (https://www.dodgeballhq.com/) for more information.
Give 3 important tips that can strengthen an organization’s information security program?
Information is intangible, making it difficult to visualize the security measures put in place to protect it. However, if we swap information for something tangible and valuable in our minds, say gold, for instance, it gets much easier to understand the principles of security; just look at a bank:
- Banks operate on the principles of trust and authority. Only trusted individuals are able to take certain actions, and some actions require the approval of several departments or parties. Treat your infrastructure and data the same way; limit what actions can be taken using an IAM tool to as few trusted individuals as possible.
- Banks have multiple layers of security in place. If an attacker manages to outwit one security measure, they may be thwarted by another. By making applications more complex to attack without consequences or major preparation, organizations can also deter attacks.
- Banks practice security drills. By planning for attacks, organizations can make better decisions when they occur. Write down an incident response plan. Figure out which systems to check first for infiltration, how quickly the application can be restored to a previous state, and how quickly external access can be shut down.
Those are a few examples, though there are many more lessons that can be learned by studying organizations that have dealt with issues of trust and safety, such as the government, military, insurance, and information security companies. The ways in which an attacker may harm your organization are constantly evolving, and so too must your defenses and mitigation strategies.
What trends have you seen emerge in Artificial Intelligence for Data Security in the past couple of years?
Machine learning is at the core of many innovative data security companies out there. There are huge benefits offered by its utilization, though there is much hype and confusion about its limitations. In that vein, be sure you understand how ML is actually utilized when evaluating a new solution to ensure it is a good fit for the technique. I caution that many organizations view it as a silver bullet buzzword for charging higher prices, without demonstrable improvements over existing processes. That being said, ML is changing the world and leading to the disruption of many industries, so it’s a goldmine for innovation when applied thoughtfully.
How do you keep pace with the rapidly growing AI Solutions product for businesses?
Honestly, it can be hard to keep pace with the latest AI solutions, given how quickly they are evolving. It seems like every day there is some new innovative technique, most of which are very problem-specific. Because it can be a full-time job keeping up-to-date with the latest techniques, I recommend subscribing to publications that consolidate the available information for you. Some of my favorite sources are Medium articles, YouTube, industry-focused publications like aiTech Trend, and tracking recent venture capital investments. You can always dive deeper into a particular subject if it catches your eye and looks at the latest academic research published on it.
When diving deeper into a subject, I recommend attempting to teach it to others to test your recall and determine if there are any terms you do not fully understand. If you drop “CNN” in a conversation, you should be prepared to answer what a convolutional neural network does, how it works, and where it is applicable. This can lead to a lot of digging in the beginning, but it leads to strong foundations on which to accurately discuss a subject.
Where do you see the biggest areas of improvement for AI for IT Operations?
I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with AI for IT Operations. Making it easier to implement AI, without the need for programming experience, will increase the number of applications and internal processes AI can be used for. To that end, no-code automation is a large area for improvement.
What breakthroughs in the IoT space are you most looking forward to from a technology perspective?
Bluetooth mesh networking is enabling low-power IoT devices with fault-tolerant communications. This opens up a whole new range of applications across many industries and will lead to a massive influx of additional sensory data about the environment. Filtering and making sense of all that data will require sophisticated AI, and will give organizations a better understanding of their processes.
What is that one quote that has stayed with you throughout your professional life?
“Do the best work in the world that you can, till the best you can do is all done.”
Patrick Bio:
I’m Patrick Teague, the CTO, and co-founder of Dodgeball. In my free time, I enjoy long-distance running, gardening, and making fermented hot sauce, though software is my true passion. I taught myself to program at 13, designed an experiment to test Robert Trivers’ theory of reciprocal altruism, and have been hooked ever since. I am a Founder Institute graduate with 10 years of professional experience in the software engineering industry. I’ve served in positions ranging from junior javascript engineer to chief software architect at companies ranging from pre-seed to Fortune 500. I have worked at companies across many industries that have all experienced issues with trust and safety. I believe the world should hold more trust, as trust is the root of all freedom. I believe that as our lives have increasingly moved online, so has our ability to commit anonymous harm risen. I believe trust and anonymity can coexist, but that we need better solutions than we have available today to protect ourselves.
Dodgeball Bio
For Trust & Safety teams who don’t have the engineering resources to build the platform and processes that work for them, DodgeBall orchestrates both the technology and human elements of their end-to-end operations. With a no-code engine that puts control of fraud tool integrations and policy definition directly in the hands of your team, the Customer Data Platform offers a single pane of glass to investigate and manage visitor risk across the entire transaction journey.
To find out more visit: https://www.dodgeballhq.com/