As anyone who’s wandered down the pet aisle lately can attest, dog food is a crowded market. Jinx, one of the relatively newer entrants to the space, seems to be barking up the right tree. According to Graeme Fleckney, the company’s CFO, Jinx is the fastest-growing of those many brands. Founded in 2020 by former executives from Casper, one of the early DTC darlings, the company is now available in more than 10,000 retail locations as well as online. Earlier this year, Modern Retail reported that the company was expected to bring in $100 million. That’s a lot of dog food.

Jinx wants to continue to grow, with a goal of reaching $500 million in retail sales. This summer, the company hired Fleckney, its first-ever CFO, to help. Fleckney, who stepped into the role after working as CFO and VP of finance at Hershey International, spoke with CFO Brew about how focusing on innovation and trends has led to success.

Jinx’s multiple pivots: In some ways Jinx was an ideal fit for the pandemic era, a direct-to-consumer pet food brand at a time when both e-commerce and pet ownership were on the rise.

Post-pandemic, it went omnichannel, entering brick and mortar Walmart stores in 2022. It then expanded to other stores including Target, Publix, and Tractor Supply. This year it expanded into PetSmart stores and can now be shipped from Amazon, Chewy, and Walmart.

Fetch the full story right here.—CV

With all eyes on earnings from Big Tech’s varsity squad (Google, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia) in October and November, focus has now shifted to the JV team of enterprise software companies: Box, Okta, Salesforce, and Snowflake.

While these B2B tech companies may not have the same brand recognition as the Magnificent Seven, how they perform can still tell us a lot about tech’s economic landscape. And they all beat expectations.

As the senior team is building (and making bank from) AI infrastructure, these enterprise tech companies are now figuring out how to fully integrate AI agents into their own software, as reflected in their Q3 earnings.

First, the Okta outlook.—JK

Are cyberattackers winning?

As we head into 2026, there’s still a significant dearth of cybersecurity professionals available to protect critical infrastructure, and AI tools can’t fully replace human expertise. But the picture is more complex if you look closer.

Cash out. Richard Bird, Singulr AI CSO, told IT Brew that attackers have at least one major advantage—the AI environment is more favorable to their interests.

“The barriers to entry for being a bad guy have dropped substantially,” Bird said. “Whatever I can’t build myself, I can rent, lease, or buy.”

AI comes up. HackerOne CEO Kara Sprague sees things slightly differently—that 2025 was a year when attackers won some advantage due to AI-driven code and other technological innovations. Cybersecurity has always been asymmetric on one side or the other, and 2026 is likely to continue to follow this trend.

“In this past year, the advantage went to the cyberattackers, largely because they don’t have the same barriers and speed bumps to adoption of AI that many cyber defenders have, such as corporate governance processes and testing,” Sprague said.

Using AI only makes things worse, not because the technology allows for more complex attacks but because it makes it easier for attackers to flood the zone. That will continue in the next year, Bird predicted.

Keep reading on IT Brew.—EH