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5 Chris Kim, Founder, UNION Labs Prior to UNION, Chris was the CTO and head of product for August Home, a manufacturer of smart locks and video systems, acquired by Assa Abloy. During his tenure he drove the team to focus on privacy and full-spectrum security, covering areas from device encryption to protect against attacks and supply chain compromise. Before August, he managed cybersecurity and consumer e-commerce products at Bank of America, eBay, and other startups. Chris began his career in consulting, working for Monitor Group in Boston, London, and Istanbul. He has a BA in physics from Williams College. In his spare time, he free-dives the California coast looking for abalone and other things to eat. Many challenges that designers and engineers face when developing secure Internet of Things (IoT) products come down to cost and complexity. How engineers address those issues directly relates to the business model. "It's hard to bring a business model into an engineering discussion," says Chris Kim, founder of UNION Labs, a deep technology venture fund building and backing early-stage technology startups. "But unless you're specifically selling an enterprise product for which the business and use cases are clear and people are willing to pay for the hardware, cost considerations start flowing back into the engineering teams quickly." Development costs constrain the amount of time engineers have to implement security architectures and approaches. That is significant because when it comes to IoT security, there's a lot to consider and many choices to make. Kim notes that generally, if you are developing a mobile or cloud-based application, approaches to security are better known. "But when you're looking at embedded platform solutions, fewer standards and commonly accepted design patterns are available," he says. "That increases the complexity for the engineer." "Unless you're selling an enterprise product for which the business and use cases are clear and people are willing to pay for the hardware, cost considerations flow back into engineering teams quickly." IoT Security Is Often Driven by Business Considerations

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