It started with an unsolicited email on the Blackberry from a Chicago-based, early stage start-up. We get emails like this all the time, and it would have been easy to dismiss it. But the first few sentences set the hook. Stu’s pitch was artful, “Every great evolution in networking infrastructure has involved a start-up taking important pieces of functionality, comprised of complicated software running on standard servers, and hardening that into an appliance. I have the next one.” In the next five sentences, Stu gave a very articulate explanation of how his company was going to solve network identity management in the same way. It was the best blind email, ever.