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by SnorkelTan 530 days ago
His first name is Brian. That’s his picture at the top. I can’t think of any other groups or organizations that have the persona of a single person. Can anyone point to an example? Genuinely curious about this.
14 comments

I always thought Krebbs was a cybersecurity firm organized like a lawyer's or dentist's office, where there is one senior person on the cover but they are rarely involved with individual pieces of work. Crazy to learn it is just one person actually, they do a lot of good work.
This is IMO an excellent example, and the one I came to post.
Previously, McAffee (John McAfee) and Norton (Peter Norton).
Peter Norton also put his photo on the box of AntiVirus.
What about Kaspersky?
As it happens, Kaspersky was founded by three people, two of which are Kaperskys.

For my mind they also haven't really traded on the 'individual security hero come to save you' person(which Norton definitely did in the early years).

Happens in some artistic fields. Rodin didn't personally sculpt all of his sculptures. He directed the effort, but it was too much work for one person. I've seen Tom Clancy novels continue getting published even though he died over a decade ago. I think there are living authors doing the same thing, farming out production to ghost writers and just signing their name to the end product.

There are famous examples in advice columns, sort of. I don't know that any of them have ever been written by different people at the same time, but they've maintained stable personas and names even as the writers have moved on or died. The original founder of the Dear Abby column was famously the twin sister of the second iteration of Ann Landers and they feuded for the rest of their lives over it. They're both dead now but the columns go on using the same byline name.

I'm not parent, but at some point McAffee could refer to either the person or the company in the past.

Whenever I read a Wolfram blog post that floats to the HN frontpage, I'm never certain if the post is entirely the effort of just Stephen Wolfram, or is a group effort.

That Cringely guy who used to post an IT column.
Cringely used to be a house name (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_name ) until one particular writer who had done most of the work managed to wrest it away for his use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely )
I always felt Banksy was a collective of artists.
Banksy is one person but he does have a team that executes most of his projects for/with him.
How do you know?
There's multiple interviews from over the years with people that worked very closely with him, including the person who was his publicist for a long time (or a very similar role, I forget exactly). You can obviously decide that it's all part of some long game of deception but it's just not needed. No one is trying to arrest him here and they haven't seriously wanted to for over a decade, he's become an institution like baked beans.
Well, for one, he can't film himself installing, e.g., fake artworks in the greatest museums in the world, as he did.

And, for those who don't know, he is from Bristol, England, the home of the band Massive Attack. I've been digging their music lately, especially their songs with the late Sinead O'Connor.

There’s video of the creation of the death of a phone box piece in his documentary and it was indeed a team of a few people.
We don't know but some argue Banksy could be a team effort by now, part of the allure of anon work
Same with Shakespeare, though that might’ve been disproven
The "Tyler Durden" author on ZeroHedge.
Using that name specifically has a bit of a different connotation than a generic one with no previous association like "Brian Krebs", though. If anything, it would be _more_ surprising to find out that someone going by the name Tyler Durden was just a single, regular person rather than something else going on.
I think it’s on the down low when that’s done.
Previously, Ray Wenderlich.
Anything Elon Musk owns?
Mavis Beacon.
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