Matt Suiche
Hacker · Founder of OnDB
Hello! My name is Matt Suiche. I am the founder of OnDB Inc., a data infrastructure startup for the agentic economy. I recently discussed cyberwar in the age of AI, Iran’s cyber capabilities, and how AI is reshaping hacking on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots and the National Security Lab podcast.
Previously, I co-founded CloudVolumes (acquired by VMware in 2014) and Comae Technologies (acquired by Magnet Forensics in 2022), where I later served as Head of Detection Engineering. I also founded the cybersecurity community project OPCDE.
My path into technology started in reverse engineering as a teenager, and has since spanned memory forensics, operating systems, virtualization, blockchain, and now AI infrastructure.
Latest
Cute characters as ideological delivery systems, and how AI accelerated the propaganda playbook.
Kind of crazy that the big propaganda medium to come out of AI wasn't deepfakes but LEGO men and Persian cats https://t.co/PEzEiamwJg
— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) April 9, 2026 Tracy Alloway nailed it: “Kind of crazy that the big propaganda medium to come out of AI wasn’t deepfakes but LEGO men and Persian cats.”
Everyone was bracing for deepfakes. The national security community spent years warning about synthetic video of world leaders saying things they never said, doctored footage designed to deceive at the pixel level. Instead, what showed up was Lego minifigures of Trump and Netanyahu set to AI-generated rap tracks, produced by an Iran-based group calling themselves the “Explosive News Team”. And it wasn’t just Iran. Chinese state media CCTV joined in with its own GenAI animal fable: “The White Eagle and Persian Cat”, a stop-motion style animation where a White Eagle Alliance dominates trade by forcing other animals to use its currency. Not trying to fool anyone into thinking the footage was real. Just trying to be catchy, shareable, and memetically sticky.
Eight months ago I published Building Agents for Small Language Models, a set of hard-won notes from shipping agents on 270M–32B parameter models. At the time, running useful local models meant embracing constraints: small context windows, CPU-only fallbacks, broken UTF-8 streams, and reasoning that fell apart past two steps.
I stand by that post. But the ground has shifted fast. What was a set of careful workarounds in August 2025 is starting to look like the default architecture for a large class of workloads. Local models are no longer the constrained sibling of cloud APIs — for many agent use cases, they are the better answer. Here is what has changed.
On March 7, 2026, I joined Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast for the second time. The first was in March 2022, during the Russia-Ukraine war, where we discussed what cyberwar actually looks like. Four years later, the same thesis holds – but the stakes have changed dramatically.