The Founder Who Convinced Google to Let 10,000 Hackers Attack It | Casey Ellis

You know, I definitely liked thinking like a criminal but never wanted to be one. I appreciate criminal creativity.

Criminal creativity, I like that.

It's like entrepreneurship or innovation without rules.

Casey is the founder of Bugcrowd, which is one of the OG bug bounty platforms and has really believed in the community building for hackers of all generations to enter into this world and use their skills. Casey's been a great partner and ambassador and friend to the hacking game since the beginning, and we've got loads to learn from Casey, not only from his own journey.

Go-to-market, Sales, you know, pitching, even like crafting your message in a way that lands. Just break it apart like you would an engineering problem.

But also from what he's seen in the development of communities of hackers and how they can come together and hopefully use their skills to keep the world safer.

Step zero for Bugcrowd was like proving to the world that hackers aren't dangerous. Yeah.

You will notice a raspy voice that not only myself but also Casey has. That's because we're on day 5 of Black Hat DEF CON.

Day something.

Day something. I don't think I've seen sunlight for 5 days. So this is— we're going to get through this, but think of it as like a kind of husky voice.

So if we sound like truck drivers, that's why.

Yeah, exactly. The truck drivers have better content than me at the moment, to be honest. Casey, thank you so much, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So great to have you.

It's good to sit down and chat. So listen, I want people to kind of learn a little bit about your own personal journey. Sure. So can we just start with like, so you're Australian. Tell me a bit about childhood. Tell me the environment you grew up in.

Yeah, yeah, no worries. Yeah. So you know, been here in the U.S. for for thirteen years now. We actually came out when we started Bugcrowd, but haven't lost the Aussie accent. So you know, it's always useful to to kind of explain that part up front. But yeah, basically, you know, born in the eighties. So I'm like a child of the The, you know, Oregon Trail kind of crossover generation. Pretty like, you know, my parents, my family are awesome. Like simple. Like dad's a teacher, mum was a homemaker. She got into, you know, doing different things. She's now a clinical psychologist, but, you know, kind of wasn't back at that point.

Did you turn her to that? Was that—

Maybe, I don't know. It was definitely a very intimidating period while she was learning that stuff. I'm like, are you— do you have an angle here? Like what's going on?

Am I your case study?

But she's awesome. She loves people and she wants to help. They're both kind of entrepreneurial as well. So like the other thing with my dad, he was doing like the teaching thing, then recognized the fact that like there's this huge gap, um, in, you know, who's controlling media at that point in time. This is back in the '80s, right? So what he ended up doing was writing the original media curriculum for, for New South Wales in Australia, and that became a federal—

For the education or for the government?

For his school initially, but then it got picked up and used and kind of spread from there. And he actually ran a TV show for a chunk chunk of time where he'd take kids effectively and teach them how to do interviews and like, here's how to lean into current affairs, unpack the story, all that kind of stuff. So it was like a precursor for, you know, a lot of what we see from a content standpoint today. But it kind of gives you a picture. They're both like movers and shakers, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So the other thing with that was Dad was a science teacher and, um, you know, I was like a super curious kid right from the get-go, unsurprisingly. And, you know, they both really fostered that. So Dad would take me to high school, like he'd bring computers home, all that kind of stuff.

That's So he was computer literate? I mean, he was—

I don't think anyone really was back, back at that point, but he was like leaning into the frontiers of tech and trying to expose me to that at the same time as, you know, like, cool, this kid's like super curious and like seems smart, like how do we give him as much opportunity as possible? So like, I was—

What age was that, do you think? Was that, was that in kind of 8, 9 years old?

Yeah, about that. Yeah, so that was kind of my, my, my start from a tech standpoint. Like, you know, Tech stuff started coming home. That's when I kind of realized in hindsight that I had the hacker mentality, because the first thing I'd do is like try to break it or get it to do something it's not meant to do. And yeah, they fostered that. So it was cool. Like, I know not everyone gets that kind of start. Like, it wasn't, you know, we're not like a super wealthy family or anything like that. It was just good people.

Yeah. Amazing. And so what was it when you reflect on when you were like building computers or taking them apart or breaking stuff? What was the motivation, do you think? Like, what was—

I think, yeah, I mean, Probably twofold. I think part of it's like just touch of the tism in the sense of like, that's just how I view the world. Like, I learn by tipping a thing upside down, seeing what falls out, and then kind of reconstructing from there. And this is obviously like now as a like 45-year-old, I can kind of reverse engineer all that. At the time I was just doing the thing. But, um, you know, I think that was, that was a part of it just in terms of natural inclination. Um, the other side of it, and, and I say this a lot, you know, I definitely always kind of liked thinking like a criminal but never wanted to be one, if that makes sense. Like, I appreciate criminal creativity. I still find it fascinating. It's still a lot of work.

Criminal creativity, I like that. I like that concept.

It's like entrepreneurship or innovation without rules, right? So you're kind of on the other side of the law. Um, you're not bound by that. Like, you're obviously bound by breaking the law and you know, the threat, threat of like law enforcement, all those different things, but you're not kind of constrained by like norms of society and the rules. So you've got this like blank slate.

But that's how Edison created—

Yeah.

And yeah, you know, yeah.

So like there's that, but then at the same time, no, I don't want to be a bad guy. So like trying to reconcile all of that, you know, growing up and like one of my heroes is Nikola Tesla.

Yeah.

For example, right? You mentioned Edison, this idea of just inventing with a blank slate. Like, I love that.

And did you sense that as a kid? Like that was always appealing to you? Like, yeah. And you referenced earlier the touch Autistism. Yeah. And, um, so did you, did you go through, um, diagnosis?

Uh, as an adult, yeah.

As an adult.

As a kid, I was a— I was in the, uh, gifted and talented class, right? So, like, if you grew up in high school in the '90s and you ended up gifted and talented, you were probably twice exceptional undiagnosed, 'cause that's just kinda how we were called back at that point.

Actually, we're doing a whole podcast series on autism, um, in Gen Z, and led by 2 Gen Z autist hackers. Uh, Lorne, who I think you met, and Gabrielle. And, um, you know, it's such an incredible way that these brains see patterns and puzzles and solutions that others don't. So what was that like?

I think it's better understood now, but at that point in time, it was just like they're, you know, a square peg in a round hole.

Yeah. Is that how it felt?

100%. Yeah. Like, even through school, you know, getting into trouble. Like, I was one of the kids in school that your parents tell you to stay away from. And why is that? Because I was just ruckus. Like, didn't care, didn't know how to fit in. loved learning, loved community, people, all those different things, but the way I was being taught didn't fit the way that my brain worked.

Can you give me like a material example of that?

Probably the best way of explaining it is just, you know, the fact that like I kind of noticed this later in high school. I'd come out of classes having learned something, but it wasn't what was being taught, and that was always true. So I'm like, what the hell's going on?

That's interesting.

Yes.

So they might be teaching, you know, a Piece of, you know, science.

Yeah, I'm drifting, or I'm thinking like down some tangent, or like whatever.

And were you rewarded for that?

No, not at all.

Were you punished for that?

Yeah, definitely.

For being disinterested or distracted?

Yeah, disruptive. Like distracted, distracting, disruptive. Like all those different things. Um, you know, high school was kind of interesting. There was a couple of really good teachers that could actually, I think, see what was going on, but that wasn't you know, back in like the '90s anywhere near as common.

No.

As it is today.

Were you leaning into math and, and chemistry and science and that kind of thing?

Mostly science, um, math, definitely like English. So like communication, that whole aspect of it. I just love like the written word.

No, but if you think about it, it's a formula, isn't it?

Yeah, it's all, you know, it's systems.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So yeah, and it like the whole school thing, like I know we're kind of bouncing around a bit here, but You know, the school thing was interesting because like at the end of year 12, which is final year in Australia, I was about 6 weeks out from like final exams and realized like I've not been applying myself. Like I don't really care, but also I've been doing this for 13 years now and like all of that's going to amount to the test I'm about to take. So I knuckled down, did like 6 weeks of hardcore studying, actually ended up doing fairly well. Yeah, from a— from an assessment standpoint. But that was kind of how I rolled back then, right?

And do you—

And had a whole bunch of friends that were exactly the same.

Yeah, that's I was gonna ask, talk to me about the community building as you went up through that.

Yeah, I ended up in a, in a selective school, so it was like the school for, you know, folks that did well at certain things and whatever. And within that, there was different groups, different cohorts. Like, the thing that was really cool about that, that school, um, was that everyone was sort of on the same level. Like, it was a really cool community, if that makes sense.

And how did you find cool?

Um, we all just Kind of gave each other grace for what we're trying to figure out. You know, we all kind of liked each other. Like, we'd fight like cats and dogs when it happened because it's high school, but then we'd figure it out and just move forward.

And people were accepted for who they were.

Yeah, yeah, that's actually probably the best way to put it. Like, it was just very tolerant, accepting. Like, we're all a bit weird and that's fine. Yeah. Um, so like, that was the bigger group, and then within that there's the buddies. And we were all like, we were kind of the, the bad crew in that sense. We were always like getting up to stuff.

In terms of like experimenting and breaking things. And yeah, but you, you know, rather than the partying crew, it was the bad in terms of like creativity and expressions, or—

Correct. Yeah, um, all, all of the above, I think, in a lot of ways. Um, and you know, even now, like looking back on that with that group, like we're all like wonderful people. It wasn't you know, a bunch of like bad kids.

Yeah, I get it.

Yeah, we were just trying to figure out how to, you know, express ourselves and, and grow up and do all those different things. So I ended up kind of in that group. Yeah.

So when you look back on as a kid growing up with an element of a degree of autism, um, how did that—

So diagnosed with ADHD.

ADHD. How did that, um, how did that help you and how did that hinder you later on? Uh, as a kid growing up?

Yeah, I think I mean, I think a big part of that, like, and this is, you know, for adults to get kind of retroactively diagnosed, it's like this epiphany moment because you're like, oh, that's why I'm good at that, and this, that's why this thing's hard, and, and all those different things. Just the ability to hyperfocus, I think, was, was probably the biggest one.

Yeah.

Because like when I get on, you know, when there's something that I have conviction about or that like really has my interest or that I want to go off and do Once that locks in, like, it happens basically. Like, I'll just find a way to get that thing done. Yeah. And again, I didn't really realize that that wasn't a normal thing until later. Like, as a kid, it's just like, isn't everyone like this?

Yeah. Um, and the hinder?

Uh, the hinder— I mean, all the stuff we just talked about, like not being understood necessarily, like having to fit into things that weren't built for the way that my mind worked. Um, and then having to kind of wing it around that, I actually think that was— that turned into an advantage.

Because you can adapt. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and that ability to like adapt that you kind of cultivate through that, that becomes really useful.

So what's consistent in these amazing brains that, um, we have the privilege of spending time with is there's normally some sort of mentorship moment somewhere.

Right.

And when I was listening to you earlier, it sounds like your parents kind of recognized this hyperfocus.

Yeah.

And they were like, well, the school's going to do the basics.

Yeah, but it's on us.

Yeah, it's on us, right?

Yeah.

And is that a fair— that's a fair representation?

Yeah. And keeping in mind, my dad was a teacher, right? So they both believe in education very much, like invested in that kind of system and process, but also recognizing the fact that like every kid's different. Dad teaches like that. Like he's always been like that. The whole thing of like, it's all about the one.

Yeah.

So you're teaching at scale, but as a, as a good teacher, like you're leaning into the person trying to meet them.

Do you think he has a similar mind?

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, it is.

He'd hate me saying that, but that's true.

Luckily he'll never see it.

He probably will, actually.

Amazing. And so then what was your relationship with the kind of hacking community then? How did that build? Yeah. What was your journey into that?

Yeah. So this is all like precursor wiring type stuff with the community in general. Like at some point You know, my first computer that I'd kind of played on in anger in some ways was Apple IIe. So that kind of— that's my vintage.

Vintage. Yeah.

And, um, I didn't really understand— this is probably 9 or 10 years old— didn't really get the internet at that point. But not long after that, I had a friend who had a modem, and it's like, what's this BBS thing? And, you know, how does that all work?

Do you go around to his house and in his whatever?

And we just mess around with stuff and like learn things. And back then, it's not— it wasn't much about like hacking directly at that point in time. It was more like, how do we, you know, blow stuff up in the bush? Because that's what you do as an Australian.

Yeah, sure.

Stuff like that, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, oh my God, there's this entire corpus of intelligence and like connection out there that we can now access and, and tap into.

Yeah.

And that was mind-blowing, right? So at that point it's like, cool, let's do it.

It's like a metaphysical version of the Australian bush, basically. You know, suddenly you've got, wow, there's one little modem.

This is like a version of playing outside, like global.

Like never-ending. Yeah, yeah.

And, and that was mind-blowing. Like, that feels like kind of a quaint thing to talk about now, you know, in, in 2026, right? But the first experience of that when it wasn't a common thing was just a complete shift.

So we're the same age, and, uh, hard to believe, I know. And, uh, but, and I had exactly the same experience. And as you know, yeah, exactly.

How's your Motrin intake this week?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Exactly, exactly. My peptide intake was fantastic. Thanks very much. Um, but I'm obviously not technical. You know that. But I had exactly that kind of moment. I remember sitting at a friend's house with a modem at his at his dad's desk, probably. Yeah, if I can remember.

Yeah.

And we got online and we got into a chat forum. Right. And now, you know, obviously, like my technical skills are zero, but my EQ skills and human skills are a bit better.

And I'm fairly high.

I remember having the moment you've just described. being about being in forums.

Yeah. With people. Yeah.

And people—

and I was on the other side, on the other side of the world.

And I remember the relational things and I was just like, wow, this is, you know, it was like the synapses just exploding in my brain.

Yeah. No, 100%. Yeah. So there was all of that. You know, I think the other part of that, going back to what I was talking about before around like messing with tech, I found a backdoor in like an Apple IIe subsystem when I was like 11.

But you were just self— you were just self-discovering. There was no one teaching you.

Reading stuff.

Yeah. Okay.

But then like playing around and, and doing different things, I figured out you could actually, um, basically drop into like a subsystem that was hidden that allowed you to modify the DRAM. I'm like, oh, that's cool. Like, probably not everyone knows this. And it feels like, you know, going back to the whole like think bad, do good thing, I can now peek behind the locked door that other people doesn't know. Don't know is, is there, like, all that stuff.

Um, are you doing that with your friends?

Uh, no, that was me on my own mostly. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, at some point I actually used that trick to fix a computer at my high school, got like a merit certificate for it.

No way!

It was neat.

But this is also your hyperfocus kicking into action, right? You found that tunnel and you were like, I'm gonna go down here.

What is this thing? I need to now like understand it, master it, you know, do all those different things. So like, that was the first time I can remember hacking a computer, if that makes sense.

So I've got this image of a kind of tall, gangly Casey who's sitting in class just like—

That's accurate.

That's accurate. You may or may not have had red hair, but I'll leave that up to you to decide. But like, kind of sitting in class just thinking, what a frigging waste of time this is. And like, I'm bored and then can't wait to get home.

Boredom. Yeah.

Can't wait to get home and get into the parallel world where you can just teach yourself. Yeah.

I can, I can actually learn more And you know, probably the fun thing to call out here is like I lecture in universities now. Like I've had tweets incorporated into course content, all those different things. I've done a total of six weeks of of university. Great.

And I also as a student or as a teacher?

No, as a student.

Six weeks.

Yeah. So I was going to do nuclear nuclear science. Like the plan was to actually become a doctor at some point.

Yeah.

Um, which is fun too because it's like technology and helping people.

It's like, okay, but you've really let yourself down on that one, Casey.

I think it worked out.

It's a lot of relieved patients out there.

But like, it was the same thing in university. It's like, I love learning, I love the people, I love the community. I can't bring myself to do 30 hours of homework a week on a thing that I don't care about and just recognize the fact that this is not going to work and kind of tapped out of that. So Yeah, I think with the whole education thing, like, for some people it's exactly what they need and what they should be doing, but I also don't think it's the only road to Rome, if that makes sense.

No, for sure.

It's not that it's bad or good.

So did you, did you finish college or did you drop out?

No, dropped out.

How long did it take you to drop out?

6 weeks.

Oh, oh, calendar 6 weeks, not an aggregate amount of days of studying and condensed.

Yeah, I was in the course and, um, in Australia at the time, um, 6 weeks was roughly when Your like student debt kicked in.

Yeah, okay, right.

So that was like the lock-in moment. Yeah. And I'm like, so what, what, what triggered it apart from the money?

Like, what was it that you wanted to go and do instead?

I, I had no idea. Right. Absolutely not.

How was that conversation at home with your parent— teacher parents?

Yeah, I mean, again, you know, they've always, I think, even through like some of the, you know, misdemeanor years, um, and all that kind of stuff been super supportive and tried to kind of lean in and kind of meet me where I'm at. Definitely a freakout moment, I think, for them, because, you know, it's— as a parent, you want to see your kid, you know, do the things and complete them and all that.

Of that generation, of course.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it was, it was— I mean, probably the other side of it for them is they knew they didn't really have much of a say at that point. It's like, if he's going to do the thing, he's going to do the thing, and that's just kind of how this works. So how do we kind of get in and And, uh, you know, be around that and parent through it.

So yeah, what did you go into then? Like, what would happen after that?

Uh, so like, this is the serendipity piece because, you know, up until that point, so I did, you know, actually worked with Dad on the TV shows. I did some of that stuff growing up, which was fun. Um, I'm a musician, so playing in bands, and, and knew that I could kind of do lots of different things and was interested in lots of different things. Had no idea what to do with that. It's the tyranny of choice, right?

Yeah.

And actually, a, a friend who I'd just recently met, um, had just started an IT company, and he kind of recognized it as well, right? He's like, okay, cool, like, you're, you know, bright, you've got potential, you're completely lost, like, don't know how to ask the right questions to figure out actually what you want to do. Would you like an internship? Right? And yeah, that's, that's actually—

What a privilege.

Yeah, it's how I got into IT, because at that point, for me, computers weren't Like, I didn't see them as a potential career. It's like, this is a cool thing that's just going to be a part of how we do life in the future. And that's— it was, it was a tool, not a— yeah, you know, career path. And yeah, he grabbed me and said, yeah, I'll pay $100 a week to learn how to, you know, do Windows networks and whatnot. And yeah, it started actually working as a network engineer. This is 2001, right?

Yeah.

But then started applying what I'd learned online from like a hacking standpoint.

And were you calling it hacking? And did you label it at that point? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And kind of realizing like, oh wow, this is really cool. Like, this is a customer that I've got. I've asked them to do this, but I'm going to go off and like do scanning and, you know, you're bridging a hobby and a pastime into something that is useful. And in that moment it was like, oh my gosh, I can actually do this stuff that I'm fascinated by. Not be a bad guy and actually build a career out of it. And that was another one of those like light bulb moments.

So you know our mutual friend who actually introduced us, Chris Wiseopple?

Yeah.

You know he uses that exact sentence for him. He was like, "Wait, someone is going to pay me to do the stuff that I love to do." Like bing!

And it's a weird thing to to think of when you're here in Vegas and you've got like Black Hats massive and you know you've got DEF CONs even bigger. That didn't really exist back at that point in time. Like the industry. was nascent. You had, like, Weld and those guys here in the US. In Australia, it was 5 years behind that to begin with. Yeah, like the whole idea of you can actually build a career out of this stuff that you love and that you're good at.

Well, there's not a playbook like if you're a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant or whatever. There's a playbook, a career playbook. This is what your next 30 years of your life is gonna look like, which would terrify the bejesus out of me. So, at that point, you're kinda 20, 21. Yeah. Um, there's a load of your friends who you've met online who have the same skill sets maybe are not doing that, right? Did they not have those opportunities? And what did you start to see? And you know where I'm going with this, like, what— where did you see with the nefarious behaviors, and, and how did that appear in your life?

Yeah, I did. So, like, why? I think for them— I mean, like, there's stuff, you know, not crime in that sense, but definitely, like, things that weren't legal for me. And I think there was that sort of sense of like, if we don't get caught or if we're not causing harm, who cares? But you're still well and truly over the line, you know, in hindsight. So like most of my peers were like that. Yeah, sure.

Yeah, this is very normal.

I mean, like, yeah, kind of doing crime but not with the intent to cause harm.

Yeah.

And the crime's more defined by the environment than the action.

And the motivation for that was personal financial gain?

Curiosity.

Curiosity?

Yeah, mostly. Yep. It's more like, oh my God, I can do this thing. Like, hey, I'm, you know, Like, you watch like Hackers the movie. Yeah, super dated, super geeky, like all that kind of stuff. But like, it literally— I've sat with, um, you know, folks that now run like massive, you know, VR firms and like very successful and kind of watched them tear up, right? Because they're like, this movie got me when nothing else did.

I've heard that story, honestly, so many times.

For real, right?

Yeah.

So it was kind of like that. So yeah, you know, folks that were getting into the like crime thing properly. I think for the better part it was, yeah, I had a really like— I was blessed with my environment.

Sure.

Yeah, right. Um, not everyone is.

Yeah. So there's— You had opportunities, supportive parents, parents who understood how your brain was working, what it needed to be stimulated.

All that. Not everyone gets that.

Yeah, sure.

And I recognize that for sure. But then, you know, for some of them, like, they were poor. So like, how do I make extra money? Like, just necessity.

Chance to make a quick buck actually is pretty meaningful.

Yeah. Yep.

So, and, um, when you, when you look at—

I'll try not to out anyone.

No, no, no. But, you know, when you look at that pathway, like, I've known you now, you know, a fair bit, and, and, you know, your moral fortitude is like super. You can see it. And so, you know, you could— there could have been 9 other versions of Casey.

100%.

Right. But there wasn't.

Yeah.

Um, so talk to us a little bit about— you've gone on a journey from kind of slightly outsider kid who thought differently.

Yep.

discovered a world he really enjoys, found a collective community of others.

Yep.

Tried this college thing, but linear, boring. Not for me. Got sponsored. That's what it sounds like. A mentor kind of said, come here.

Yeah, 100%.

I can see potential. And then fast forward to now, you know, you founded a company that Series E raised a bunch of money, probably most famous bug bounty platform in the world. Where was that leap from the gang?

What happened in between?

Yeah, yeah. No, but like, as you as a person, like, that's quite a big growth. life as it was and journeys.

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question actually, because yeah, with the internship that turned into basically building out a security practice.

Yeah.

Um, so in the process of doing that and also like playing in bands and like social work and all that other stuff, that's in hindsight what taught me leadership.

Yeah.

And that was great. Uh, but the thing that happened that was kind of interesting in the middle of all of that is when I got married, you know, I quit my job For us to go on our honeymoon because you did.

Yeah, right.

They wouldn't give me the leave. I'm like, yeah, I'm only only planning on doing this once, so we're gonna do it right. So I quit.

I may quit a job a couple of times. Yeah.

But then my wife got laid off when we got back. So like we're like newly married, unemployed. Like what do we do? And you know something that she said at that point in time I think made a big difference. It's like you you people good too. like folks that have these tech skills generally aren't communicators. They're generally not like folks that think through business or need or like product market fit or any of those different things. And she saw me just doing that naturally.

Right, right.

And also saw the fact that like I just didn't think that that was unique or special.

And I've met your wife. I've met your wife. But what's her background? Explain a bit about her.

So she, she was in HR when we got married. like IT recruitment, same sort of thing. Like grew up, you know, church, social work, like that kind of stuff.

She sees people, like, you know, she's not a— she's not an engineer. Yeah, that's what my— that was my feeling when we met.

She's like super high EQ, like empath, like people person. She loves it at places like this because all of the introverts— she makes introverts comfortable.

That's a big part of what she does, which is fun.

Yeah. Um, but yeah, like it was that whole thing around—

So she shone the light on you a little bit and said, hey.

She helped me recognize the thing I didn't realize was there. I'm like, can't everyone do this? Like, what do you mean? She's like, no, this is actually a thing that, you know, not everyone can do it, which makes it valuable, right? But also this idea of like bridging technical concepts with the business, like that's a really important thing to be able to do. So like you should try sales. And I'm, you know, like a, what, at that point, 25-year-old, you know, hacker.

You should try sales.

I don't want to be able—

How did that digest?

Oh, it didn't go that well. She was right, but it's like, you know, I don't want to be a white hat sellout and like all these different things that you kind of go through. But I gave it a shot. And, you know, the thing I learned through that period was, one, I'm good at sales and good at entrepreneurship. I'd never thought of myself as a business person up until that point, right? Like, I invent things and come up with ideas and whatever else, but it's like the whole idea of actually solving the business problem around it.

Mm-hmm.

that hadn't been switched on yet. So—

And you were doing that for another company or you went entrepreneurial straight away?

No, no, I went, I went into sales for 4 years.

Yeah.

Um, and somewhere— yeah. And then somewhere through that, had again great mentors through that process. So you can kind of see the theme there, right? But yeah, at some point like recognized the fact that like if I can do the back of house thing and the front of house thing, like maybe I should do a thing, do this entrepreneurship thing because that seems to make sense.

Yeah.

And yeah, like learning, honestly, like learning— I think the big thing, and for this audience as well, because I am going to assume that there are people, you know, in the orbit of the hacking games that have a similar kind of combination of skills, it's all just an engineering problem. Like go-to-market, sales, you know, pitching, even like crafting your message in a way that lands. If you come into this from like a technical background and can't reconcile that because you think of it as a people problem, just break it apart like you would an engineering problem and approach it like that. That's kind of how I hacked my own brain into getting better at that stuff.

I had a— our CTO you've met.

Yeah.

John Madeline is just one of the most extraordinary thinkers of all time. And when we first met and we got to know each other, he kept saying like, why are you guys— why are you doing this marketing thing? We just need to build the best product. And I was like, John, you can build the best product, but if it doesn't solve someone's problem and no one knows about it— Yeah, the tree falls in the forest Yeah. And he really like— it took him a while and he did brilliant conceptual leap where he now understands it completely because now we have more customers than we have ability to ship product to.

Right.

So it's always like, I got people to use it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, even with that, it's funny because like, you know, Bugcrowd and like the whole like applied hacking thing, like in a lot of ways it's entrepreneurship without people kind of realizing it. They're like, oh, you're going to pay me? And, you know, everyone who hunts, they're a small business operator without necessarily realizing it.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Self-sufficient. And what tends to happen is you get a couple of them that like realize that, like, I want to go build stuff. But then like this pattern is like constant, you know, the whole idea of like, I know how to solve this problem. I'm like, great, who cares?

So looking back—

So how do you think through that part? And then, you know, yeah.

So looking back at Bugcrowd, um, we're looking at Bugcrowd Yeah. You know, of course it's known as an enormous bug bounty platform, you know, the most prestigious, but it's super clear and you describe it yourself like this is people. Yeah, not technology. This is communities of people or attract— oh, you've built a community of hackers, right, who are self-sufficient in a way.

Yeah. So I think of it as both, but like people as a primitive. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. In the sense that like, I, you know, like what about AI and blah blah? Cool. Like, crime predates the internet by like a couple of thousand years, right? It's a product of human intent, human need, human creativity. And whatever technology you layer on top of that to accelerate it doesn't change that primitive.

Yeah.

So that was like the theory going into it.

Yeah. And what was the moment that triggered you to set up Bugcrowd?

So at that point I was running like a, like an outsourced pen test company. So I had a crew in Argentina and the Philippines. We front-ended it locally and, you know, resold services. Great. Probably 2 things. One was like looking at the problem-solution fit. It's like if I can pay these guys $200 a day, mark the whole thing up to, you know, $2,000 a day by the time it hits the street and everyone walks away happy from that, like someone's getting screwed and it's the user.

Yeah.

It's, you know, the whole idea of like one person being paid by the hour, it doesn't matter how good they are, they're not gonna be able to outsmart all of this on the bad guy side. So that just annoyed me as a system-level problem. The other thing was having grown up at this point in the hacker community, like realizing that there was all of this talent and all of these people that actually wanted to help that were pretty much just unplugged from, from the problem. And that's like legal stuff and all those different things. But part of it was like, how do you make it easy for them to connect with opportunity to help? And then how do you teach the market that they're actually there as an asset?

Yeah. Not a threat.

Not a threat. So it was really those 2 things that were kind of rattling around in my head. And, you know, the other thing that was good from a timing standpoint was like over here in the US, like Etsy, eBay, PayPal, a couple of others were starting to talk about this whole idea of bug bounty programs.

Yeah.

So I chatted with, you know, pentest customers and basically said like, if like 50 people could do this work for the same outlay, do you think the result would be better?

Yeah.

Than one?

Yeah.

And the answer is yes, because math, right?

Yeah.

And then I asked like, why aren't you doing it? And like the answers to that question were really what became Bugcrowd. Because it's like, oh, they're all saying the same thing. Yeah, like I'm scared, I don't know how to pay people, I don't know how to run this, like blah blah blah. Okay, if you can solve those objections, then all of a sudden you get to plug these 2 things in together and off it goes from there.

And describe to me the first cohort of— what do you call them? Bugcrowders? Buggers?

I guess we could, but it lands differently in different parts of the world, I think. So yeah, we don't do that. So do you mean on the crowd side, or—

Yeah, on your, on your first community, like, who came into Bugcrowd to start doing the, uh, the bug bounties, right? What, what were their profiles? How did you find them? Who were they?

So that was like, I— so part of what had happened there was, um, you know, in the course of working in the industry, it's Okay, there's all these people that— because I was doing work that I couldn't talk about as well as like corporate stuff. I'm like, where, where are my people at? And then someone said you should check out Twitter, which is how all that got started, right? And, um, yeah, like what I'd done was to basically like learn and network and build community, not to build a business, but more like, where are my people at?

Yeah, right. But, but, and how did you do it?

Just talking to folk. Yeah, like listening, reaching out, like being involved, contributing, like just being a part of that, like learning how to.

And was there a prototype? Was there a type? It was— it was making it all small, medium, large, east, west, south, whatever.

Yeah, so that was like the precursor when I decided, yeah, screw it, let's give this a shot. Um, yeah, registered the domain bugcrowd.com, like the light bulb moment. I was just, just describing, um, happened on a flight from Melbourne back to Sydney. And I actually registered bugcrowd.com that day.

Did you?

So you can actually go look it up and see when that all happened, which is neat. But yeah, like did a signup form and said, hey, if you want to like hack on some cool stuff, I'm going to try this thing out, like sign up if you want to. And like 3,000 people joined in.

From your community? From your—

From my, like, like my own network Was the seed of that, but then it kind of it went viral by 2012.

Was it the was it the first bug bounty platform? Wow, the first one.

Yep. So this is before like yeah, this is a very different time in terms of how people think about this stuff. And in that group, there's people like HD Moore, right? Which blew my mind. I'm like, this dude's my hero.

Yeah.

And now he wants to like part of my mess around with stuff that I'm like tinkering. So that was scary and awesome all at once.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, a lot of folks like that, like a bunch of folk that signed up in that period actually ended up becoming Bugcrowd employees later because they were already on the same page around what we're doing.

What was it? Many try, many fail, most fail. What was it, do you think, that enabled you to stimulate this community?

I think they were ready to go.

They were, right? Yeah.

So like the role I played in that is like identifying the fact that they were ready to go and creating opportunity for it. But I didn't create that part. Yeah, I think that part was already there. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So timing and understanding, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah. We've had a very similar experience with the hacking games and I sit there and I mean, just even just yesterday walking around Black Hat, to be honest. I mean, you know, I'm thinking, I don't know how it happened, but the community just appeared. Yeah. On day zero. And, and then community brings community and we had the benefit of like you know, we have a great mission, right? Let's stop kids becoming cybercriminals, right? Yeah. You know, and, and I think that if we had tried to do it 3 years earlier, we would have been shouting into the abyss.

Could have been harder.

Yeah.

Like, timing is— timing is so important because, like, I, I, you know, try to be quite deliberate about talking about the things that weren't— yeah, you know, I did a bunch of stuff that worked and made some good decisions, but then there was all these environmental, like, serendipity things that kicked in as well. And then it's always like that.

And then those moments when, like, you, you were describing— what was the name of the of the hacker who came on that you really were in admiration of? Though you just said just now one of the hackers, one of the really famous—

Oh, H.G. Moyers.

Yeah, H.G.

Moyers. He's the author of Metasploit.

Yeah, yeah.

And like, yeah.

So for me, my equivalent moment of that was when Chris Weisbart just suddenly like got on a Zoom with me and I was like, oh my God. Yeah. And then Marcus and then you and then, you know, and suddenly it gets an energy of itself. And Jeff Mann, who's become a mentor and, you know, it's just the community is a powerful and beautiful thing, but it needs—

Well, and the thing as well is if you do it right, it creates a gravity well. Yeah, right. Like, you know, one of the things really early on with Bugcrowd, we do shirts and like swag, and like this is really common now, but then it kind of wasn't. And like part of what we were doing was to try to create intrigue.

Yeah.

On the demand side, because like, who are these guys? Step zero for Bugcrowd was like proving to the world that hackers aren't dangerous. Yeah. And that, that took a lot of work.

Um, still part of it, still a lot more work.

It's still, it's still a thing. But then it wasn't even like a possibility. Yeah, right. So we had to create that.

Yeah.

And yeah, like the first t-shirt that we made, um, for DEF CON 2013 was, my other computer is your computer.

Yeah, so it's got some insight.

That's the exact, that's the exact reaction. That's funny, right?

It's clever.

That's what that is for hackers. They want to wear it because it's badass and kind of funny at the same time. And then for folks that aren't hackers but are curious, they're like, huh, I get that.

That's cool.

It creates this rally point.

And how did the community evolve over— I mean, it's 17 years, right? How long is it? 17?

2012. Where are we? 14.

Yeah. So how did the community evolve in its kind of identity, age, global spread?

Look, I, I think like the global aspect of it has definitely been, you know, we had to learn how to translate. And I'd like— I've talked about that a lot over the years, like the whole idea of if you're trying to listen to the entire internet, you've got to learn how to speak a lot of different languages, like understand a lot of different points of view. And ultimately, because the goal is to find a bug and fix it, right? So like all the things that go into that, that's our problem, not the customer's problem. So like understanding, you know, the European hacker community, like how is that different?

Like, it is.

I grew up in— yeah, I grew up in the Australian community, which like Aussies punch above their weight on this stuff. So I was kind of blessed in that regard as well. But it's very different to, you know, learning about like the Loft diaspora and Chris and all those guys, um, you know, India, like South America, like all these different things that kind of go into it. Realizing really early on that like that's going to be a big part of what we do. Like the story I like to tell was that there was a— we noticed that hackers from certain parts of the world always sounded angry.

Interesting.

And you know, the thing is that if you're like a customer of ours doing this for the first time, if your first interaction is getting yelled at, it like obviously not good for Bugcrowd, but not good for the community as well. Yeah. So what's going on? And then what we figured out was like, if you pushed back but offered to try to understand things better, sorry. And like what it was was a part of the world that like assumed that they have to be aggressive and abrasive to get the attention of like Western companies. Yeah.

Like, oh, okay. So they didn't have insight, that's all.

Yeah. And they weren't actually angry. They're not bad people or any of that. They're just communicating in a different way.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And what about the age profile? And obviously I'm interested in that because, you know, we started 2 and a half years ago, and we've started with, you know, Gen Z youth growing.

And yep, which is so key.

But yeah, and I do look at the industry and see it as a lot of middle-aged— yeah, dudes.

Yeah. So I, I mean, in, in terms of like, I don't feel like an old man. I do sometimes, but you know what I mean. But I do consider myself to be like in the elder generation From like a community standpoint, right? And you know, there's a lot of people in this cohort that are doing a lot of different things because we're of age now where we've had the means to start stuff and you know, whatever. We think differently to to the younger generation, and like they know stuff that we don't. We've got wisdom and experience that they haven't necessarily tripped over yet. You know, to me, like that's that's I gave. the closing keynote at BSides last year on this, just talking about like cross-generational knowledge transfer.

Yeah. Is that happening?

We're getting better at it, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

But this idea of like, you know, the profile of hackers, like it's— it kind of should get to the point where we're like, we don't actually know. Well, you know what's really interesting? The whole Roblox thing.

Yeah.

Like when you told me about that, I'm like, I have a son who plays Roblox. I didn't put those things together, right? But like, that makes perfect sense. And the reason I miss that is I'm not him.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, exactly. And actually, you know, Einstein is the one who said that he didn't have a new idea after the age of 24 years old. Yeah. And the truth is, yeah, we all infantilize the young generation. We treat them like children.

100%.

But, you know, you will see that there was a massive hack on the UK government yesterday.

Yeah.

And that was a 17-year-old again. And that's just hot on the trail of Jaguar Land Rover, Co-op, Marks Spencer's, Transport for London, Uber, MGM Grand Casino.

Yeah.

And it's the teenagers running rings around the adults.

Yes.

And again, and you know, I'm quite vocal about this, but it is amusing to me at the cybersecurity industries that all the people on the stages talking about the future are the old people.

Yeah.

That's all cool, guys. So, you know, yesterday at Black Hat, the closing Black Hat, I brought Ricky up, right?

Right.

And Ricky and Marcus. And, you know, Marcus is probably a little bit older, but, you know, Ricky's just come out of jail, did 4 years for crypto heist, was part of the comm, rebuilding his life with Amanda and his 2 kids. Great guy. FBI referred him to us as a great kid who made bad decisions.

That's cool. Yeah.

And let's listen to him.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's listen to how he sees the world and what does his generation think about the practices and the behaviors.

Yeah, like, I, I think going back to your question, how has it changed over time? Like, my generation came into this without, like, preloaded acceptance, so we had to, like, fight our way to the table. Which is a lot less true now.

That's interesting.

On, on that side.

Give me an example of that.

Um, I mean, this, like the fact that there's, you know, 40,000 people at the convention center right now, like that wasn't true back then, right? So the whole idea of—

It's more accessible now.

Yeah, and, and it's more accepted. It's an easier conversation to have. Like back in the day, you talk about hacking and, and people are like, oh, that's that weird—

Yeah.

Thing, or don't even know what you're talking about. Nowadays it's dinner table conversation.

Yeah.

So like, it's easier for all of us to be able to contribute and connect in whatever, you know, manner that might mean. So yeah, my generation, like the fight thing, the whole like the laws assume that we're criminal, we kind of feel like we're doing sketchy stuff a little bit. So there's like that anxiety in the background anyway. I, I don't think that's as true now, if that makes sense. Like there's all of these different things that young people can, can plug into. But at the same time, there's still this sense of like, well, we're different.

Yeah.

Like, how do we, you know, interact with like the market, with each other, all those different things?

It's, it's changing though. So Andy Burnham, who's the latest British Prime Minister, right? Um, we like to rotate them every 9 to 12 months.

It's, it's a good reminder to change the battery when you smoke a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The next one will be Count Binface. So have you heard about this guy? No, no, I'm going to show you after. This is very amusing. Nigel Farage is trying to defend his political seat in a by-election, and the only person who stood was a stand-up comedian who dresses himself as a trash can and calls himself Count Binface.

That's very British.

He's got a lot of national support.

That's awesome.

So, um, but Andy Burnham, who's our latest prime minister, um, uh, came in 2 weeks ago, and he— one of the first things he announced was like, we need to change, uh, interview processes, right, for everyone, not just for the government. And he said, we've got to stop doing Zooms and asking kids to Zoom in over, over Microsoft Teams or Zoom or whatever.

Yep.

Uh, how can we evaluate someone who's never worked on a 30-minute video for a kid who's probably grew up during the COVID generation and has got a whole load of social anxiety?

100%.

And then Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary, came out and said, um, and we've lent into teaching the wrong disciplines in high schools, and we're not— we're assuming you need to come out with an English literature degree, right, rather than Like, be an engineer at 18, right? Right. Get apprenticeship skills, get hands-on skills.

Or even just learn how to learn.

Yeah, learn how to learn. Exactly, exactly. Be curious and feed it. So I think there's a change coming.

My, my, my daughter, um, just graduated, so she's now in college. The process— like, she's a bright kid, she did really, really well, so she's like got a lot of different options and a lot of different opportunity and had a ton of anxiety around like doing the right thing.

Sure, the expectation, the expected thing.

And part of what I did with her was sat her down at one point and just said like, it doesn't matter.

No. Well, case in point.

It does. Yeah, I have bias on that obviously, but like the whole idea, like knowing her and how she thinks, it's like, no, the thing you need to learn in this season is how to take whatever you learn in this season and adapt to whatever comes next, right? So you're not putting yourself on rails for a career right now. Like you're learning how to learn in a bigger way to what you did. In high school and just, you know, took the pressure off it. And she's doing musicology.

Yeah.

So I know you mentioned that's a great career path.

And also it's systems thinking. Yeah, right. You know, which is listening to you as a— you said you're a musician as well, as well as system thinker. And then you add in the ADHD and you can see a pattern of how the brain is seeing patterns.

Apples don't fall far from the tree.

Yeah. So, so I, when I, I grew up, you know, went to uni, I had a very conventional education. I went to university and everyone either went into management consulting or investment banking Right, right. Yeah. And so I was like, well, I've got to get a job in an investment bank. And the problem is I can't count. I mean, I genuinely can't count. Sure. So, uh, so, but I somehow managed to get a job in investment bank, right? And, and really, and it was competitive, and, and actually it was kind of a bit of a miracle that I got it. And then I turned up on day 1 of the training program. I'm not going to mention the bank because, you know, they're still going, but it was one of the famous ones. And I sat with 69 other graduates. Yeah. And, uh, I immediately felt I'm in completely the wrong place here, right? And everyone was super clever, super quant. They're obviously, you know, really bright people, all guys actually. And I just was so obviously the odd one out. And then this, uh, director of the bank stood up on a stage, and he was a pretty unattractive human being, right? Uh, wearing— not all the wrong shapes, he was all the wrong shapes, and he wore a ridiculously expensive suit that didn't fit. And he sat there and he said, I'm extremely rich, and you are going to work extremely hard to make me richer. And if you're lucky—

What a pitch.

If you're lucky, one of you guys can be just like me. And I— and the funny thing is, I saw 3/4 of the room were like this, you know? Yeah. And I just was like, oh my God, that would be a jail sentence. Yeah, get me out of here. And I quit. I quit.

I'd run screaming from that too.

Yeah. And that was— that was like— it was like a sliding doors moment of 2 pathways, right? And what I learned from that afterwards, and our head of psychology gave me this, this metaphor, is that when birds of prey go hunting, they ride gyres. And gyres are thermals that go in concentric circles up. And the first thermal they jump on is low and narrow. So the first animal that they see is a rat, but they want to go hunting. So the higher and wider they go, the rat goes to a rabbit, to a baby fox, to a baby bear, to a baby stag, until right at the top of it they might see the mongoose.

Right.

And that's what they want. And then they swoop down and go and get it. And I think in our generation, we were conditioned to be in a very linear academic and career journey. That's what our parents knew.

Yep.

But in your daughter's generation, it's— access to information is so incredible.

It's different.

Yeah, it's not a life commitment unless you do choose to be a lawyer or a doctor or something.

But which, by the way, is a perfectly valid—

Absolutely. We need them.

Yeah, we need them. The incentives in education, uh, like they're basically from the last industrial revolution.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah.

And like, we've kind of already gone from that.

Yeah.

Um, so this idea of like, yeah, your job as a facility is to churn out cogs to fit into a machine, like we're kind of exiting—

Well, the machine's in the museum.

Yeah, exactly.

That machine's in the museum now.

So, you know, it begs the question, what's next? Yeah.

So talking about, you launched Disclosure.io. Yeah, Disclosure.io. Can you talk to us a bit about that and what's the mission?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I mean, like the big thing with that, like doing Bugcrowd, like all the stuff that we just talked about around like how it fits in, the changes that we needed to make around how people perceive hackers, all of that stuff pretty quickly turned into we need to change the law itself. to at least acknowledge the fact that like we're not all burglars, like some of us are locksmiths, because that doesn't really exist, didn't at the time. So that turned into this whole like, you know, 8-year conversation with the DOJ here in the US that ended up with CFAA reform and similar things in, in the UK with CMA and Australia.

And so you were, you were behind, you were kind of part of the team?

Me and a bunch of people, but yes, very much so. So what Disclose.io is, is basically, um, you know, the attempt to actually standardize that right across the board. Like, how do we create infrastructure that supports not bug bounty in the way that Bugcrowd does it, right? It's not like a specific application. It's more the fact that like it happens on the internet, people are going to find it. How do you allow them to connect to you without feeling like they're going to get their door kicked in? Yeah, right.

Absolutely.

At the same time as educating the community on how to do that well. So it's a not-for-profit. It's very much a mission-driven thing. It's one of those things, you know, I finished up full-time with, with Bugcrowd in January.

Wow.

Wow.

Big moment.

That's a whole other thing in terms of like the process.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. But, you know, like continuing to double down and work on this because honestly, it just needs to happen. Yeah, it's one of those things where like as a problem space, it's like this is a dumb issue for the internet to have.

Well, it's super live. There's a story that is coming out in The Times with Mark Selman, who's publishing it, and probably be out by the time this is out. Yeah, about a 17-year-old kid in Birmingham in the UK who found a vulnerability in their education platform in his school.

Right, right.

But it's like an international company. So he disclosed it.

Yep.

And they told him to go do one. And they, they said, no, no, we don't know, we don't want it. And then they threatened him.

Yeah.

And then they kicked him off the platform.

Right.

And then he actually took it to the NCSC, which is our National Cybersecurity Center, and they gave him an award.

Yeah.

And said it was like of the highest grade exploitation.

And like This is the thing, like, is like Disclose.io is very much like an awareness, like it's, it's tools and all those different things, but like the main purpose of it from my perspective is to drive awareness around all of this and encourage adoption. Yeah, because one of the things that we do have is like an open source repo of stuff like that.

Yeah, threats, right?

And then guidance for businesses to like, yeah, you don't want to end up on that list is one part of it, right? But like the whole idea of like this is still a thing that happens in 2026. I think a lot of people look at like Bugcrowd and HackerOne and like all these other companies that have like grown and assume job done, and it's not at all.

Well, and also, as this whole conference has told us, the world is all about agentic attack vectors. So, you know, that's the answer. I don't know what the question is. Yeah. Um, Casey, thank you so much for your time. It's been really awesome. Absolutely. You too, man.

You too.

Um, I'm really excited to see what you do next. I think building communities is one of the hardest things and most important things.

But it's so rewarding. Like, people are awesome. Yeah. And they're annoying sometimes, and there's cost and there's mess and all those different things. But like, the fundamental, you know, creative value of humans, like, I just love that personally. But I think it's so important to the future of where all this stuff goes.

So, okay, I'm gonna— I haven't done that. I haven't planned this bit. I haven't done this before. So we're just gonna throw it out there. But you just said that. So It is quite easy to walk away from this event in cybersecurity, first of all, with like an eye roll at the marketing buzzwords, but secondarily being pretty pessimistic about what the future looks like. You just gave me an unbelievably optimistic opinion just then about human-first communities. So how are we buoyant about, about the future? Well, how do you feel?

I think, I think buoyant at the same time as being realistic around the stuff that will be hard, right? Like, this is one of the things I love the most about founders in cybersecurity because like we know where the bodies are buried and how broken things are, but there's still this sense of like, I think we can maybe solve that. So yeah, I'm like, I'm buoyant like about the people, about, you know, the new generations coming in. Like, you know, there's, there's folk, you know, very involved in the policy department at DEF CON and there's lines out the door. Like when I walk into those rooms, I know maybe 10% of the people there, which was not true for a really long time, right? So like, there's all of these good things happening.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's going to be hard. Like, some of it's going to be, you know, not that great. Um, there's, there's fights that we've got to fight, there's hills that we've got to climb. Um, but again, coming back to the whole, like, the creative capacity of this community, the heart that it has, and then, you know, the opportunity to actually engage and activate that I can't not see a future where that doesn't prevail.

I also think this community is going to go from being the kind of outliers, outsiders in the shadows to actually being like the epicenter of government, companies, society. Hackers are going to be the most aspirational set of skills. Parents are going to want their kids to have these hacking mindsets.

That's—

and I think that's changing now.

That's effectively my story. Yeah, yeah, right. Like when you think about it, it's like, okay, cool, odd duck, hacker, all those different things, trying to figure it out. And then through, you know, choices, good and bad, like environment, mentorship, opportunity, all those different things— like I was at the White House, you know, a month ago talking about AI and different things like that.

Dangly redhead teenager from Australia.

And like, you know, I bring the things that I bring to that, but that's not necessarily just a product of me being me, I think that's the seat that we have at the table.

Yeah, right. No, I agree with that.

Yeah.

So what's next for the foundation? Like, like, what does the future look like?

Yeah. So like Discloso has been basically volunteer driven, you know, me in my spare time and like a whole bunch of other phenomenal people, you know, propping it up and moving it along. Like the thing that we're doing now is actually getting it through 501 certification and we're actually raising money. to, to be able to, you know, hire people and actually take this whole thing forward. Because the community side of it, I think that's so important and so powerful, but at this point, like, that mission needs stability in how it's executed. So that's a lot of—

What kind of donors do you think it would be suited for?

Um, I think a lot of folk that— I mean, honestly, like, a lot of the people I've been talking to are, you know, folk from my vintage.

Sure, but individuals, families?

Yeah, individuals. Uh, some, uh, of the kind of more research-focused, like, cybersecurity companies, right, as well. Because, you know, this is an opportunity for them to basically go out to the community and say, like, we get it, we care. Great. Yeah, fuck like that.

Well, we'll put the link in, in the underneath the podcast, so, um, to the website. And basically everyone should donate. I think that's the—

I think that's right.

That's pretty much the answer.

I'm biased, but yeah.

Amazing, amazing. Cool. Brilliant. Um, Casey, thank you so much for your time. It's been really awesome.

Absolutely.

You too, man. You too. I'm really excited to see what you do next. I think building communities is one of the hardest things and most important things.

But it's so rewarding. Like, people are awesome.

It's the greatest. Thank you so much for coming. I really, really appreciate it. Cool, man. That was fun.