Crypt Kids Keynote

the b-sides DC 2016 videos are brought to you by clear jobs net and cyber sex calm tools for your next career move and Antietam technologies focusing on advanced cyber detection analysis and mitigation thank you very much for that in a direction so as mentioned my name is Liam Randall and this is me and my family so this is my lovely wife Katie I think I've met everybody here at least once if not more than once at bro workshops or other places and I'll let these two guys introduce themselves so at name and age please eiman how old are you seven Karen Karen I've and this one down here is shavon shavon how old are you can you yell real loud she's three

right so you know I'm a lot of things I think most of you know me as a network security monitoring guy or perhaps the bro training guy the critical stack guy I used to be a bunch of other startup guys and I've got a lot of things that I've been very lucky to find in my life and I've had a really unique journey that kind of took me from point A to point B I so I wanted to you know first start it and talk about you know what's the goal of the keynote it's kind of a huge honor to get asked to give a keynote especially for a kid's crypt con right a kid's cryptic on you know when

we're when we're talking about security I wanted to sort of think about you know what is our real goal here today you know we're gonna we're going to learn we're going to have a good time we're going to spend some time with the community maybe we're going to experiment with some new things and we're going to build relationships with not only the people we brought but perhaps with new people we're gonna have a chance to share what we're passionate about if you think about all the parents here we're probably in technology in some way so that's something that we're really incredibly passionate about and this is our opportunity to continue to share those passions with our kids with

like-minded adults it's a really unique community and one of the main reasons why my wife and I just relocated out to the Northern Virginia area for a long time I've commuted globally for bro training and other events but we're local now and it was a big push for me was that I wanted to be near community of people like nova hackers and other orgs that were interested in doing these kind of things so with community in mind I wanted to start by plugging a few of the open source projects that I'm heavily involved in the first is obviously still bro there's a we did a six-hour free workshop yesterday for another 60 folks we've got another 80

slots for tomorrow most of which are full but yesterday we did get all of the overflow spots in so if you're interested in learning a little more about that I can't make any promises but I will do our best to squeeze you guys in to the room I so far I think we've been able to every year squeeze people in I think our count just from free bro workshops that we've done it besides DC is over 600 people free workshops and globally I've probably done about 2,500 now I have everybody and get so it's easy for me to pull them on there's another great open source community that's coming to DC here shortly sherkot akan it's a high speed fast pattern AC

matcher it does a lot more that's a really unique event to have in the city so if you're in tech I would really strongly encourage you to check that out she want you coming up here okay come here uh and among other things I'm now involved in both shirkada as well as OS query which is a host base agent and if you're interested in hearing more about that I helped get the team started up in their new adventure up in Boston here you know speaking of community I wanted to start by sharing some of my own personal story and I picked up my mother to share her story a little bit to start mine because she grew up in the midst of

a civil war in Northern Ireland not that far away and not that long ago and she fled in 1969 to marry my dad who was in the Air Force at the time he'd been drafted and it's multi with 60s in the United States let's not put that in my mouth police on me and he was lucky enough to be in the Air Force stationed in North Africa and I remember as a young man going to visit my mom's family and I asked I said mom you know how could you ever possibly leave these people they're amazing they're wonderful and her response was simple she said there was no opportunity she said I wanted to have a family and I

wanted you guys to have the ability to pursue your passions and that that wasn't available in Ireland at the time and so growing up in Kentucky which is where my parents ended up I had a really great childhood being in Kentucky there's lots of rural things to do so a lot of fishing outdoor camping and stuff like that and I was lucky enough to have family members that were very entrepreneurial II minded so my earliest job that I remember was actually working at flea markets and we sold everything we would sell these little my first big sale was that rubber band gun right there it's got a little sprocket in it so you'd load these big red rubber bands

in it and you could like rapid-fire them I still remember how exhilarated I was as a six-year-old making a $25 sale and you know you know BIC bantering back and forth with a guy this was nineteen eighty three or so and we would go on to sell things like cuckoo clocks and t-shirts blood tests I was sort of like a little child barker at these events you I'd go out Andrew you know wrote people in and pull them into my booth and so if you've ever seen me at my bro training I think it now kind of all starts to make sense right you start to see that little bit of carnival you know festival nature and my bro training that

I do I went on to run fireworks booth so we would stock shelves in the summer and then we'd run these little store side tents and we do fifteen thousand dollars in fireworks fireworks sales over a seven day period so I sort of grew up with this really strong entrepreneurial spirit that really served me very well I want to say that that's my first true real passion that I discovered was that I really liked controlling my own destiny I like to see the ability to work really hard and then to capture those results myself so I've been this evolved into the serial entrepreneur my weirdest job is definitely number three I was an actual clown on a riverboat on

the muddy Ohio River I got paid one hundred dollars i taught myself how to juggle and got some little pocket tricks and i did this birthday parties so in a four hour cruise I get a hundred dollars cash no questions asked that the time that was definitely my PQ no earnings per hour maybe fireworks a beat that ten years after that I went on of course to work in restaurants and lifeguards before I found my second great passion which was around network security and I'll share a little story here now that the statute of limitations has passed so when I when I went to university in 1995 I went to Xavier University in Cincinnati it's a

great school is a great school for me very small computer science department and in high school I was that traditional nerd I remember I got a freshman profile into my profile they're like what do you like to do and I said I like to take apart things like hair dryers and understand how they work I actually said that and it was true because that's what I was doing on the weekends rebuilding machines teaching myself about electronics because I didn't really have that large of a social life to sort of pivot around after that and in college was that weird time for me when being in technology became very cool I got hired by the university as a full-time employee and

we didn't have a red team I'm fortunate enough now I'll tell you about it later to be a capital one and I see if some of our red team's back over here they're great guys we didn't have anything like that at the time I was doing what you would call DevOps i was writing utilities in pascal turbo pascal bleed or not they would run in a netware logon script to push software i was really exciting and I remember my first vulnerability that I found was the ping of death right and uh not being an inexperienced young man I didn't really think about the consequences of testing in my own environment so I crashed a few

workstations not a big deal and then took down wwdd you and it didn't come back up until it was replaced two weeks later I have no idea what kind of kernel panic I caused to you know overwrite the MBR I don't even know what that what the heck happened but it turned into a minor debacle and I I just you know was testing I didn't really think about it so I that was my the first time and until recently only this latter two years ago I had my second time when I crashed something on accident when I was testing out another exploit or actually testing out a fingerprint but I can't talk about that one yet

so let me skip ahead a bit so let me skip ahead ten years after that past college passed the first couple startups to 2005 and I'll mute this and hopefully the video still plays good and at the time had been dating my wife are in my now wife for quite some time and we planned this epic trip to China because I was going to ask her to marry man I wanted her always have the most epic engagement story of all time so is at the end of the Great Wall marathon we finished right there at the finish line we made it on CNN we made it on sportscenter we made it on all these kind of things but I was shocked when I

was over there and it was a very personal to me to see all of these kids and I actually I didn't include the youngest kids in the video I tried to pick kids that look like they were around 16 17 18 that I pulled out but in our personal videos everywhere we went in China every market place we went to were those little kids working those flea markets and I commented to my wife about about how that was how I grew up but that wasn't how I wanted my kids to grow up and it felt kind of hypocritical because I wouldn't change my childhood I wouldn't change anything I've done even though even the the lowest low that I've

had ended up turning into one of the best things ever happened to me but it was very powerful and it made me somewhat hesitant and fearful for my own kids even though this was years before I was even married and had my own kids and I commented about how all of these kids are growing up with the skill with these skill sets that you pick up being a young entrepreneur that that you when you're out in the marketplace you sort of learn all these things and and by show of hands let me ask who how many of you as parents here wouldn't want your kids out doing these jobs right here you know there's you missed the machete

right not that many right but let me ask how many of you as parents would want your parents to have that work ethic and pick up those entrepreneurial skills right that sort of go to market the ability to market themselves the ability to fail and to pick yourself back up and that's where that's when I sort of felt like a real hypocrite and had a some real personal reflections about what I do with these guys right because I want my kids to grow up with the ability and the opportunity to have similar sorts of experiences that are outside of the classroom they're outside of traditional educational systems because for me personally most of the technology stuff I picked on my

CS degree was incredible but I really learned when I was out working and the entrepreneur skills you know I learned all that on the fly didn't ever get a business degree or anything and the sort of DNA that I've really adopted here is this this that a start-up is a search for repeatable scalable business model it makes it different than operating a business and I reflected on that about how life is sort of a search for finding something that you can repeat that you want to repeat that you want to scale that you want to be passionate about and move forward so that's that's looking back and that's well and good and all but I thought about taking it a little

further and then trying to look ahead and you've ever seen the videos of the Amazon work centers or the increasing levels of automation in our society it certainly provides a bit of opportunity I mean we're in tech right this is our bread and butter but at some point you have to wonder when the scale tips and we start to outpace ourselves I'm not going to let this one play all the way I think you guys get the idea but I did want to show you the next one which is the new Tesla factory where this is about the most meta thing I could find right now that's actually current and invoke this these are robots building

self-driving cars think about that for a second right robots building self-driving cars transportation is still the number one employer in the United States and while I'm passionate about technology and I think I'm trying to you know teach my kids that passion is contagious you know I see how excited I am about arduinos and circuits and robotics and they get excited about those things but that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to pigeonhole them into what I love I want them to have the ability to you know to discover their own passions and I'm certainly not the first person and we're certainly not the first generation to think about how technology is going to impact us the Luddites actually were

afraid of like the looms and the weaving and this guy a Connor at gessner I try to find the oldest example that I could find and he printed a book about information overload on the Gutenberg press right and he was like there's too many books there's too much information the human mind can't deal with all this and I thought I looked for quotes but they were all like they were too old time I wanted to do I wanted to find a quote I could read and you would you know not know if it was modern heard or not but that didn't work out so I'll just sort of explain it so that's looking back and

that's that's thinking about for it yes Karen you'll do your jokes in just a minute we're almost to the jokes part all right so we're all raising our kids with iPads and technology and there are these digital natives right they don't know what it's like to not have that and and what are the consequences of growing up with things like Google AI have you installed who's installed a loo on their phone that's google's new chat bot okay after I'm finished speaking before you do anything else install it and instant message a friend with it it is incredible it's like having all 100 million of Google's answers and little pivots that you can get in a browser

that you can ask it questions available to you and chat so you can do things I don't know if you can see this very well you can say in a chat with other people conversational you can say ok Google how much is it to fly to Cancun next weekend and it will come into channel and interact with you and it has this intent driven interface if you will it's the best way I can describe it where it understands what was the intent of the conversation and it gives you these options here at the at the bottom of each chat to drive the conversation forward and it continues to learn and get smarter as it adopts to your working

styles it's a pretty amazing kind of thing and the new google home which is their version of echo just came out that is also another interface for this so it's there's this universal interface for that i'm tremendously excited about it and we don't have it yet but who has an echo anybody all right here's another great product to really sort of understand how your kids are going to interact with technology and boys i don't know if you realize this but every question you ask echo shows up on daddy's phone did you guys know that you did not know that so I wanted to kind of go through some of the things that my kids how they're interacting with

sort of basic AI yes sweetheart copley here you want to tell you Tom good Utah but what are we saying all right he doesn't want to talk so apparently i did already tell them that I don't want to do that that would be embarrassing break my laptop and everything so there were the expected things right so can you please to dino charge do you want to have no stitch play frozen play uptown funk you up play Kidz Bop 30 play scooby doo play the jurassic park theme which i love that that was on the shirts today i didn't actually know that to the outright amusing what is love we want I'm Your Mother do you star wars another

joke why did the chicken cross the road what does Pikachu's biggest week weakness do another knock knock joke tell another joke use the Force what is your quest play the funniest joke in the world play a joke play another joke can you please do knock-knock joke right it goes on and on to the outright unexpected and boys can you explain this to me why you guys ask how big is the Sun in meters and then say how long is the Sun in centimeters Karen can you explain that San appeared why do you ask that come here stand up stand up here here tell everybody why do you ask that good because is really funny promise I

did like a million numbers all right sure so what so how do you ask the question Alexa Alexa how many um centimeters are in the Sun okay how many how many centimeters are in the sonic sort of makes sense now some of these do how do I get ketchup out of my shirt how do you say kind of go to kind of bad in Spanish how many lemons can you throw to time how big is the Sun in inches what is the distance from the earth to the Sun and centimeters what are what's a dog what how much does the earth way in ounces what's the distance to the Sun in centimeters how much lava is there in the earth how hot

is the sun and this is my favorite in this category can you make a cake please guy said you Donna thank you are you riding my shoulders hey and of course with any technology there's the inevitable problems and you know you see Amazon echo capturing capturing some of the family drama that just caused do you think that you said the cake question I bet you did so we see somebody said you're the worst this was probably me no I'm your father stop sit down and eat right you do not override our instructions right so that this sit oh sit down and eat was mom right and and our kids are growing up with this technology and you know what does it

mean to always be able to have this AI participating in our in our lives and that led me to a category I'll just tag out as the surreal is the war are you always listening can you scream for me what is the loneliest number can you talk how many days have you been alive do you have a boyfriend are you awake you are dead how long do you sleep can you die tell the kids goodnight how many days have you survived when were you made and it's interesting to see that that anthro anthro Methos a shin I did not say that weird right but I think you all know what I mean to the technology

where the children as young children not fully intellectually developed have our building relationships with a piece of hardware and technology and when when the Google ok Google comes into my house I'm somewhat interested to see how that conversation evolves but looking back or looking forward altima Lee we just don't know we're sort of stuck in this a position today where we don't know what's going to happen none of us and if we think about you know what's the real goal here I'll go back to I'll go back to hope you know what boys we missed this part here we were going to tell your joke you want to tell your joke all right come on up

here so on the joke on this joke phrase I was supposed to pass the mic to hear in here so go ahead care what you do knock knock boo don't cry just the mailman or something hmm all right get another one what's next wide the cow cross the road to get the movies one more all right one more job why the bike all right he was too tired that wasn't that was awesome Kieran thank you very much ok so keyring you're passionate about jokes what else are you passionate about you want to have any other passions you doing einmal Iowan what else ah jik building anything yeah may God and in train tracks yes ok thank you

Karen I appreciate that Emma what about you do you want to tell anybody what you're passionate about do you want to do you want to tell me and I'll tell them no you want to tell me over here

pokemon and violin and I think he's gonna he's gonna play us out at the end of the day with something that he wants to share with you guys so when I think about you know what is the what's the goal here I I go back to some of the formative experiences that I've had an entrepreneurship and I think about startups in particular where I've spent the last three three jobs 15 years of my life in startups and you think about all the reasons that people get into startups and why they fail people get in because they think they've got this disruptive idea they get in because they love the technology they like to build things they want to make a lot of money

the glory but none of those things ever really seemed to work out because a lot of times things are terrible even when you're passionate about it it sucks it so couldn't be the worst thing ever and Steve Jobs does all these talks where he talks too frequently spoke about passion and you talked about how without passion any rational person would give up you wouldn't stick with anything that really mattered any hard problem that mattered and one of the ones that I've really dived in on is a security and I've spent a lot of time about the last 15 years almost exclusively working in security and thinking about a defense in particular because defense is really

hard no offense to our red team I love what you guys do but defense is is even harder than that and this sort of modern security paradigm essentially is is that you accept that the goal is not prevention it's the minimize the risk of loss due to intrusion and the sort of 10 general understanding there is that compromise is inevitable that's another way of saying that failure is inevitable right that part of your process needs to understand that a lot of the things you try aren't going to work and a lot of times it's how quickly you respond to that and taking that idea and applying it to my own life personally failure is inevitable and I'll share a quick story

here that leads to a very happy ending to startups ago I was working my ass off I was flying all around the world I can tell you I'm sorry the language there I can tell you that in two years I flew a little over half a million miles I visited a hundred or more cities I was away from my family non stop putting in 110 percent and for a variety of reasons the startup didn't work out and I ended up being fired at the worst point the day I was supposed to get paid nearly sixty thousand dollars which I needed to feed my kids here right here with you guys it was a very devastating

experience I'm very fortunate to have a lot of supportive friends an amazing wife actually my first call was to Brett Thorson if you guys know Thor he was in the room and I was I was still flabbergasted I was like I still cannot believe that this just happened and over the next few days we were reeling my wife and I talked about it we decided to take another bite at the Apple and to have just accepted that this was failing fast so seven days later I did another startup critical stack which was a pretty small team with pretty huge results today we have over 6,000 customers and we've built this a platform around Kuber Nettie's let you

container eyes and scale pretty much anything and I talked about that happy ending we went from fired fearing that we were going to not be able to pay our mortgage to less than 18 months later being acquired by Capital One Bank and it wasn't the desire to be rich that got me through those months it was having a supportive community it was being really passionate and believing in what I was doing and it was accepting that it is okay to fail even if it's embarrassing even if it feels humiliating because that's what it felt like so when I think about you know what we're doing today I don't really think that we're here to talk about you know vocational work for

our kids we're not here to talk about what jobs we can you know but you know shoehorn them into because everybody knows text gonna stay hot until it's not but I was even trying to think about you know what kind of jobs would we be preparing for that don't don't exist and thinking about the AI was thinking that maybe there'll be an AI therapist right a job that your your job is to help diagnose weird emotional behaviors in AI or a drone manager or a human Android integration specialist but but I think that that's totally the wrong idea because the goal is not to find jobs for my kids it's to help them try a lot of

stuff and find out what they're passionate about and then figure out how they can do that the most because that seems to be the real trick to success and enjoying yourself and getting to go to work every day and still being able to say which I do I can't believe I get paid to do this it's unbelievable that somebody gives me money to come in and do what I get to do right so how do we get there I don't think child labor where we started is the right is there is necessarily a right way to get there but I do think that together in this room this is the best example that I can

think of because it comes down to community it comes down to family and it comes down to service and that seems to be the real path to success so what my strategy is for my family and what we're doing out here today is after the keynote you'll find us over hustling volunteering community service style in the b-side script con with some Arduino kits some little robotics kits and you can come over and build robots with us and every 30 minutes we're going to run a quick little android starter a workshop and this is the first time we've ever done it and you know what it might be a total failure but that's okay thank you guys very much and Amon is

going to play us a man is going to play us out and what he going to play she's going to play a song called andantino so this is one of the things that aim is really passionate about that he wanted to share

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thank you guys very much we'll see you guys over at Abby's I script con kids Krypton