Eric Basu of Haiku: A Fun Way of Cybersecurity Learning

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am thrilled to have you here on the Tacos and Tech podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos in Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to be joined by serial entrepreneur Eric Basu, chief executive officer and founder of Haiku. Hey, thanks for joining us.

Hey, Neil, thanks for having me.

It's good to have you on. I've known you through the tech community of San Diego for a number of years. Watched the rise of Sentec and want to congratulate you on that. Excited to hear a bit of the story of that, but want to give you a first chance to tell us.

What's haiku?

What are you working on?

Yeah, it's a five stanza Japanese poem which. It's kind of funny. When we first started the company, one of the people who signed up for the prototype said, this is not a haiku. Well, you're not wrong, you know, I picked the name Haiku because it is kind of like Amazon. If you were asked kids nowadays what Amazon is, they look at you kind of funny, like you got a third eye in the, in your head and said, are you just messing with me? Say, well, when you say Amazon, do you think of a very tall race of women who, you know, had a tribe somewhere around a river named Amazon in South America? They're like, no, you don't think about that. I'm like, exactly. So haiku, kind of like Amazon. Easy to say, easy to spell, and it eventually is gonna take on a connotation of its own. What Haiku is, is we basically create games that train, and very specifically, we create games that train in cybersecurity. I actually became aware of when I was running Sentech because we hired so many cybersecurity people for our government contracts. And, you know, regardless of the, regardless of the certifications, a lot of time they just didn't have the hands on skills. And I kept thinking to myself, can it be that hard to actually learn these hands on skills? I mean, people get them, right? They get into a job and they do the job and they get the on the job training and they develop the hands on skills. Why can't we train for these skills? Since it's actually more important than it was to have the certification or it was to have a degree for a lot of the work that we did. And so we developed a prototype of the technology when I was at Sentec and when I sold Sentec, I healed that off and we built a haiku into what it is today, which is a set of products that do a far better job of teaching people hands on cybersecurity skills and we connect them to jobs as well than most other methods.

Wow. Incredible. You and I both have a love for workforce, the future of talent, and I'm very excited to kind of hear when that spark happened for you. I mean, I know obviously on a government contract, but I'm sure it's deeply rooted in building companies and hiring and managing. So I'm excited to hear a bit more about where that all started. Why don't you take us back? How did you end up down the cybersecurity route and even in the tech world itself?

Sure. First career was in the Navy. I was an officer in the SEAL teams. I got out, I did a couple consulting engagements. I worked for a very good friend of mine, Bruce Carruthers, at a company called Elitem back in the day in San Diego. And Elitum was One of those 1999 ish, 2000 ish tech companies that failed. But what I got out of that was having Bruce as a friend and a mentor, and he's been on the board of directors of all my companies since then was I got to see what I wanted to do, which is be an entrepreneur. And so I looked at people like Bruce, and at the end of every day, when they looked in the mirror, they weren't complaining about their boss or, you know, complaining about economic conditions. If they made it, then it was largely because of their efforts that they had some luck. I believe there's some luck involved in everything, but a lot of it was making your own luck. And so I really liked that idea of a lifestyle. And so I became an entrepreneur of my own. I started Sentec when that company, Elitem, failed. We started off, it was just me starting out of my living room and eventually brought on some business partners, moved those partners out. Later on, started hiring people. You know, at first, when I first started, it was, I'd like to make enough money in this to be able to make as much money as I would if I had a job. Then it was, I'd like to hire two to three people. Then it was, I'd like to get to 10 people. Then I'd like to get to a million dollars in revenue. Then I'd like to get $10 million in revenue. And Neil, as you're someone else who's built companies, you know, this is kind of how it is. It's very seldom do you go in there, okay, here's the deal. I'm going to go in there, I'm going to have $100 million in revenue at five years and everything's going to line up. It never works that way. It's kind of a, you know, particularly I think, your first one where you're still figuring it out as you go. It ends up being a series of, you know, steps that end up being bigger things. Then all of a sudden you find yourself in charge of a $45 million company. We were the largest small defense contractor in San Diego, and we had up to 200 people at our max, slightly over 200 people. And I sold that to Deloitte in July of 2021 after 20 years. You know, great sale. It's actually really hard to sell to a big four because their due diligence team was literally as big as my company, I kid you not. I mean, they had as many people just on their due diligence team as they did in their company. But I was able to convince them of the value that we brought. They didn't want me because they don't want rogue entrepreneurs just kicking around. They wanted my executive team, which is a huge compliment. Right. It's like somebody telling your kids, well behaved, you know, we don't want you. We want your executive team because what you built is gold. And I'm like, thank you. Go ahead and pay me for that and make sure everybody gets taken care of. And they were. Some people left, moved on. You know, sometimes it's not a good cultural fit for a lot of other people. They've done very, very well with Deloitte. Deloitte is serving our customers in San Diego very, very well. All the feedback I've gotten is the, our navor customer is very happy. I get the same people and I get even more support behind them. So it was a great sale. 20 years it took me to do that sale.

Yeah, that's a overnight success. Twenty years in the making, if I remember. Very service heavy. Right. So your people were the product in many ways.

That's exactly it. It was, we were services business, you know, which you could argue is fairly commoditized. But we got a very good multiple in ebitda. And for any entrepreneurs out there, it really is about the locating your strategic buyer and really understanding what it is that makes a strategic buyer. And again, there's always luck involved, but you make a lot of your own luck. I have looking for a buyer for probably five or seven years and had beginnings of a dance, you know, with a few different buyers and Deloitte ended up being the right buyer. So I think for people that are looking to exit, it really does. It's the same way that you built your business. It takes a lot of work to really put that in there. I only used an I banker to process the paperwork. They weren't, to be honest with you, quite really that helpful. They just took a really high commission to process paperwork. As I look at the price per page that I paid, you know, it's extremely high. But sometimes that's just the cost of, you know, playing the game.

Sure, yeah. Certain, yeah. There are just certain kinds of transactions that need a certain kind of person to process the paperwork. In real estate business, you know, many things take me through a little bit of Sentec's just iteration. Did it always start with a cybersecurity talent focus all the way through end.

Or matter of fact, it was 2007. We, we started, I started in 2001. It was actually 2005 when we got our first cybersecurity contract. And we started off doing just C4ISR command and control, system engineering. And. And I was at a conference and I think it was in 2005, and a bunch of admirals were on a panel. It was about network enabling the Navy. We're going to connect everything together. Common protocols. Get rid of all these obscure protocols and obscure languages. Everything talks in the same network. And they were asking questions. And I said, because they had 10 tenets by which they were going to do this. I said, cybersecurity is not one of your 10 tenets. Why is that? Is it because it's just going to be the underlying basis for everything? And they looked at each other and one of them said, well, I guarantee it'll be on the next slide. And that was my epiphany. We're seeing the same thing with Internet of Things now, is that as people connect things, they're more concerned about the benefits they get from connecting it than the risks that they increase by the fact that they're increasing the attack space and they're eliminating the security through obfuscation, where if you have things on a different protocol with weird programs, it actually takes a nation state set of skill sets to be able to hack into them. If everything's sitting on IP and it's all on, you know, common OSes, any script kitty can download a script and go hack into your entire system. And that's where you see now you have hacks that they rip through corporations because everything's on common set of protocols.

Interesting. Were you doing cybersecurity in the seals, or how did you really find that this was the area that you wanted to go build a company around?

Yeah, it's funny, people ask me that, but we were the first SEAL platoon, I was a SEAL teammate to deploy with a computer. And I still remember I asked the chief of the platoon why he didn't use the computer to do reports. He goes, I'm not going to spend any time learning this thing until I'm sure they're going to be around for a while. So just to give you an idea of how early we were, we didn't have that. The seals now, they actually do drones and cybersecurity and a whole bunch of cool things we didn't do. We were lucky to have that one suit. It was literally a suitcase computer. So I did not do that. I did do computers when I got out. I always liked computers. And when I was, you know, in the Navy, I would actually put together networks with My brother in laws because they were IT guys and we would play video games together. So I always had a mind for computers and I always enjoyed them.

And so the talent that you were kind of amassing to build this is all very technical. Or they coming from a wide diverse pool of industries or take me through the team that you eventually built up.

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. I had some of the developers I had from Centek and I brought them over. But defense contracting, not necessarily a good fit for commercial. It's a kind of a different mindset. When you win a defense contract, you pretty much got that contract for the next five years. And so you aren't necessarily trying to satisfy customers who on a regular basis who are going to be dropping or buying your product. Commercial is completely different. You're trying to, you know, if you get one bad review, you're now playing cleanup because all of a sudden Your sales drop 10% per day and it makes a huge differ. So what I ended up doing was we actually had a prototype product out there where we had a web based interface going on to an Amazon Web Services network on the back end. And we just, it was kind of a marketing alpha where we were testing our product and the feedback we got was immediate. We had people said, I love your pitch of a video game that teaches cybersecurity, but this is just too darn hard, guys. I go through the, you know, the hero story you're carrying me through and then I get to this network and I'm like, I don't know what to do. This is really, really hard. The other people that came in there said, I love the idea of this network on the back end. I can go start hacking. Can you get rid of all this stuff on the front end? I really don't want to be carried through a hero story. I just want to hack. And we look talked about it and said, there's no way we're going to reconcile these two. But what we can do is we can transition them because the need for cybersecurity, three and a half million unfilled jobs, it's a number that's been touted and thrown around a lot. There are a lot of people who want to get into it and they can't get into it because they don't have the experience. And so how do we get these people from over here who really want to get into it to the point where they can now do these harder things? And then we get them jobs with employers. We help them get jobs with employers. The video Game does that because it's a very easy way to learn learn things. And so I actually built a video game development company and I've told people that people this before that are kind of like, so you just gamify it. I actually had this conversation with a number of people and it kind of helped solidify our mission statement. Said, so you gamify training. I thought about it, I said, no, we create games that train. And they said, so what's the difference? And I said, if you gamify training, you're taking training that's boring. And take anything you call it cybersecurity, esg, sexual harassment. Pick some training you're required to do that is boring. It's all boring. And they put leaderboards and badges and sometimes you have somebody walking around in a virtual reality, but it's still boring. I mean, it's still not fun if you create a game first. Nobody's ever tried to create a game that's boring, right? I mean, that's the whole point. You play a game because it's fun. So we start with a game and then we use the ways in which games train you to get people to internalize the skills they need. And to be honest with you, when we built Haiku, world of Haiku, that's our true video game, it was kind of an experiment. There's a woman that named Celia Hoden that wrote a book called the Gamer's Brain Brilliant lady. And she talked about how to best train your players so that they will enjoy your game more. And we read that and I made it mandatory reading for my entire dev team. I said, we're going to repurpose her training methods and she was a psychologist as well, to teach cybersecurity. And so we do that. We avoid cognitive overload by having too many things going on. We keep it a very simple interface. When we're teaching complex skills, we introduce a skill. Once we introduce again, we give the mind a break by something else and we go back and we do it again. There's another company that pretty much most people are familiar with that does this very well as well, called Duolingo. And we've actually called ourselves the Duolingo of cyber security. And interestingly, our mission statement is we make games to train Duolingos. I didn't realize this until after we'd already made our mission statements. Very similar. I forgot exactly what it is. But something like we create games that train, that teach the world or something, you know, very similar to that. And I mean, they're doing Something very similar. They're creating games that actually teach people cybersecurity. And I love Duolingo. I always try to make sure I'm on the leaderboard and you know, somebody's trying to catch me. And we actually just had a meeting today about how to take some of the best practices of Duolingo and incorporate them into our plans. Sorry, that was a long answer to your question, which is the team I assembled. So I've got a game development team and so there are no kidding, union developers. We outsource some of our work to Ukrainian developers. They're extremely good. No idea how they work in the middle of a war. But you know, God bless them, they're doing great work and they're really exceptional. I have a Amazon Web Services development team and a react development team. We've got a user interface team, you know, quality assurance. I mean we've got probably around 30 folks right now on the, in the company total that are building our, our products.

That's awesome. Well, congrats on that in such a quick time as well. Obviously built a team over 20 years and now it's a year later in building this. So, you know, you learned a few things to speed certain things up and not make the same mistakes, but from a workforce and like customer perspective. What were some of the things you learned from building a past company to know who the customer is that you want to take this through now?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting and one of my advisors, Bruce Crowe, as a matter of fact, the same person I had mentioned, he's actually pretty well known guy in San Diego, he had said, Eric, he goes, you know how to market to the government better than most, but you don't know anything about marketing to consumers. And Bruce knows me well enough that if he throws down a challenge, I'm going to be trying to become real. And I said, you're right, I don't. But I'm going to learn, I'll tell you that. So we spent a lot of time learning about consumers, social media, how do you make things go viral, what makes, you know, people want to buy your product. Still in the learning process obviously, because we're continuing to build the company. But you know, certainly marketing to consumers is a different sort of animal and different price points, different methods. You know, the sale is, everybody's waiting for the sale. They may only save two bucks, but man, I'm not going to buy the product until I get the sale. One thing we're doing that's very similar to what we did in the government is we're selling to education. And so we realized early on that we're actually not competing with universities. And certification programs were the perfect complement for them, partially because of our price point and partially because of what we do. And I was talking with one certification provider and they said, well, we see you as competition. I said, I'm not competition. I'm not going to be hiring any instructors and creating any online videos. They'll tell you that right now. Plenty of people out there in the market do it and they're better funded than I am and they can go ahead and do that. I have no desire to do that. I said all I do is I teach hands on skills. I'm teaching the muscle memory that comes with these skills. We've created patented technologies that use gamification and actual games to teach you the hands on skills that you do. I'm not going to be hiring an instructor to do the curriculum. That's all necessary. But what I can do is my products can augment your course curricula so that your students not only get the traditional excellent education, they now have hands on skills to go with it. Because typical, you know, cyber security certification courses and there are 800 universities in the United States with cybersecurity courses, either degrees or certifications or both. They, they do it very traditionally. They'll have labs. I mean, if you ask them, oh yeah, we absolutely have hands on labs. How many labs do you have? Well, the student might be due five labs during the course of the certification. Not that much really. I mean, a total of maybe two hours of time, you know, maybe. And so my response to that is, well, what if they had labs they were doing every single day? What if before they even started your program they had a video game they could play? And so when they finished it, they have a baseline level of cyber security knowledge. The professors know that they know this person who has finished this and shows you their haiku skills resume has, you know, 50 hours of basic command line Linux. Now you can start teaching your students at a completely different level. You know, you start your students at a higher level. We have the Haiku Pro. We're working with San Diego State University. We have a partnership with them on their cybersecurity program. And we're developing specific ranges specifically for their courses. Professor Eric Nielsen said, hey, can you do a botnet range? And we sat there and said, yeah, we can do a botnet range for you. And so we went ahead and built a botnet range. We're still building it. Right now, and that's gonna be part of their curriculum. So he now can go ahead and teach his course and you can just tell the students, hey, by the way, your homework for tonight. I want you to log on to the Haiku Pro botnet range and go ahead and do that and then show me your results tomorrow. Or just, you know, send me results via email and I'll go ahead and check it and see how you did. And, you know, so this is a completely different experience for the professors because they don't have to have any. They don't build in their own labs or do anything like that. They just say, hey, I'm partnering with Haiku. The price point, you know, our original product, World of haiku is $25. The premium product, 1799 per month per person. You know, they kind of look at that and they, they're like, that's it. Oh, well, okay. You know, they're ready for, you know, you know, $100,000 pitch. And I'm like, no, it's, it's actually very cost effective. And so it becomes a no brainer really for universities to actually add this to the curriculum. The other things we do, and this is working with Lisa Easterly at the Cyber center of Excellence, and she's just been a great person to bounce ideas off of was we created the haiku skills resume. And so if you're trying to get into cybersecurity, it's really hard to get in without the experience. Really hard to get the experience. Even an unpaid internship is hard to do. And so what we do is because we created video games, we can track everything they do in these video games. So now what we do at the end is for somebody that's a subscriber to Haiku Pro is we say, here's your skills resume and you can put it together and it will tell. And so they can show an employer, I have 100 hours of training in offensive cyber security. Of that in reconnaissance, I have 30 hours and I'm rated an apprentice level 2. If you drill down into reconnaissance, I've used the Nmap tool 139 times over one and a half hours. And so literally nobody else can do that. You can go through a cybersecurity certification course, but you can't go to an employer and say, this is how many hours I have at hands on skills. You can say, I sat in lectures for five hours. Okay, that's good. Or I had an online video for hours. But if you can combine that with, I've done this certification course. And I have 100 hours on the keyboard doing the exact same things you're hiring for. That's where, you know, the, the employers are like, okay, you don't have the five years of pen testing experience I wanted, but darn, this is the next best thing. I definitely want to give you a shot. And so that's unique. Nobody else has that. I think we're still in Haiku Pro Beta right now, but by the time this podcast release, it's going to be actually out there in premium. And so, you know, I encourage people to go out there and try it out and take a look at it. And we're actually tracking some of our students through there and we're asking them, hey, give us feedback on how employers, you know, react to this. We're going to continue to update this and make it better and better so that it becomes a living document that you can use in your career. The other thing we do is I found a lot of people as they're in cyber security, they don't know what they want to be. I want to be in cyber security. Oh, what do you want to do? Big career. I don't know. I don't know what's out there, what's a, what's an entry level job. And so as we're tracking what they're doing in their skills, we reach out to the job databases and we pull out jobs that are asking for the exact same skills they have. So if they're out there doing NMAP and using Hydra and John the Ripper, we'll go out and look for jobs that are looking for exactly those skills and present them to them and say, here are some jobs that are asking for your skills. Now most of the time, particularly in the beginning, they're not going to qualify for everything else the job requires. But now I've got the student thinking about, well, maybe I don't want to be a pen tester, maybe I want to be a soc analyst. This soc analyst is an entry level job and it looks like something that I can do these other qualifications for. So we're continually keeping the student focused on the end goal. Right? We're keeping them focused on that brass ring. Heck, we're dangling that brass ring in front of them every time they turn over the job connect page to keep them motivated, to keep them, you know, engaged in both their full time coursework. If they're doing it in a university, as well as our, you know, as well as our hands on training, that's pretty incredible.

I mean, this is the fact that you can map alternative career paths through this too. You don't have to be cookie cutter for your degree and kind of go through this. It's really about learned skill sets and prove that you're employable, which really is what all employers want. They don't necessarily want someone from a degree from this school. They want are you going to be do the job that I need get done? And it seems like you're filling that gap. Do you think that's unique to cybersecurity roles to have those accessibility and alternative career paths to get a job through your program?

It's really interesting. I actually spend more time thinking about that than you'd think. I'd say certainly cyber security has become this, right? I think before, go back 10 years when it wasn't even a career path, you'd say cyber security. And people go what? So you're, what do you are, you're a network, you know, you're an IT network. Admin. What are you doing? I don't know what that is. And you know, so certainly they required sometimes a two year technical degree or a four year technical degree. But now you fast forward 10 years and there are very specific programs that you need to work on. And I mean, so you need to be good at, you know, certain SIM tools. If you're going to work in a soc, you need to be kind of like if you were, you know, if you had a general network administrator degree but you didn't know a particular tool the employer wanted, like SAP, they wanted SAP experience and it's a very similar sort of thing now with very specific tools. And so I certainly think that that's the opening, that's the, the business opportunity we see is a lot of the universities are still teaching a lot of the high level concepts and a lot of these things which are very important, right? If you're going to go into particular and you want to do other things, you do need to understand a lot of these, but they don't have the time or maybe the ability to focus on. We will teach you how to use Metasploit. Here's a Metasploit class. I mean these are the kind of things you do when you get out and you pay $3,000 for the class. So we'll go ahead and teach that in addition to their other trainings. So again when they go into an employer, the employer is like, okay, this is great, you got a four year degree in cyber security. Oh, Metasploit. You actually use Metasploit. Oh yeah. Here's my skills resume. I have 100 hours of training in Metasploit. Oh, I've actually never even seen this before. Holy crap. No, you're hired. Right? Love this. Okay, so for other jobs, you know, it's interesting. I think about this a lot and I think as we become more specific with very specific tools, I think certainly we're going to be seeing more of this. Right? And I make the analogy to people when they, you know, when you hire a plumber, I don't ask the plumber. I said, do you have a doctorate in philosophy? I mean, if he does great, you know, maybe we can sit here and chat. But what I really want to know, does he know the difference between copper tubing and rubber tubing? Does he know how to prevent leaks? Has he done this before? You know, these sorts of things. And there was a good analogy my chief operating officer actually gave. He said he took a cyber security course when he was in college. And he said, but it was all conceptual. And he goes, the reality is I can't go and use anything I did, but I know the concepts of cyber security. He goes, it's almost like in order to learn how to play guitar, I went to a music class and I was taught music theory and I learned about Beethoven, I learned about all these other things and I gathered them and go, hey, I still don't know how to play guitar. He goes, now if you combine that with, I'm learning how to read music and music theory and I'm taking guitar lessons every single night. And you know, somebody's actually saying, hey, you put your hands here and you know, here's how you do the chord and here's how you tune the guitar. He goes, then I would have learned how to play the guitar and combined with that course, I would have actually known, you know, a lot about guitars and the history of guitars and all that. He said, that's what I see haiku as being. You're giving the hands on schools to augment the other important things that are being taught in college and certification programs.

What's the minimum amount of education or anything you need to start and jump on on the game?

For World of Haiku, it's zero. I mean, and we actually designed it that way. I actually had somebody online, he was kind of a mean guy saying, this game is designed for five year olds. And I kind of looked at it and said, no, I mean, you show me a 5 year old that's gonna be able to do this game. It's actually, I mean, I've seen adults who get stuck, you know, halfway through it because it's not that easy. It's, you know, cyber security concepts. And once we get you move further in the game, we go beyond the tutorial where you're actually required to use those concepts in an actual network actually gets pretty difficult. But we designed it probably 12 and up. I mean, you know, literally 12 years old and up. I've seen teenagers actually using the game. It's just a fun game. And I've seen people saying that it's, oh my God, I love Rascal, the artificial intelligence you have there floating around. It's so cute. People want plushies of them. And it's just a fun game. It's got a great backstory. It's a dystopian cyberpunk future, kind of like Blade Runner. And you're running around trying to fight, of course, you know, the typical evil corporations that are trying to do terrible things with your information. So it's a fun game, but. But you're sitting here, no kidding, learning the real skills that you need to learn, and you're doing them over and over and over again. We actually created a repeatable side mission called a dojo, where it randomizes every time you go in there. So you want to practice your NMAP command. You can go in there and do it until the cows come home. You can do it forever. You continue to build the skills, you continue to build your resume, and there's literally nothing else that's going to let you get that kind of muscle memory. And I've seen this in the comments we get from people on our social medias. I've never actually seen anything that teaches muscle memory like this. There was a Australian Defense Services member with adhd and he said, I've had Linux installed for two months. I haven't been able to get myself to learn it. It's not easy, to be quite frank. He goes, your game is the first thing it has actually taught me. Learn it. Linux. I love it. Thank you guys for doing this. So we've gotten incredible kudos from people and we kind of looked at each other and said, okay, we got this right. We created this learning module engine sort of thing in our. In our game. Now how do we expand that out and get it in front of more people?

People, yeah, that's where I was going to ask kind of next where you're headed. So is it mobile only right now or is it mobile and desktop? How are most people interfacing?

It's actually all desktop because it's keyboard based. Yeah, we. We actually were just talking today about mobile, and it's just not a great fit. There are other things we could do for mobile later on. We've got some ideas with it, but reality is we're developing muscle memory on the keyboard, which is how people work. You could, I mean, do it on your phone or do it on, well, not the world of haiku. You could do Haiku Pro on your phone or on iPad. Some people might. I personally wouldn't, because I kind of like to have a full keyboard. But some people might choose to do that. They choose to, you know, do everything on that. You know, where we're going from here, we've got some really exciting things in the works. We're looking to create dojos, the ability for users to create their own dojos so that you could get, like a university professor, for example, that says, hey, I want to, you know, create this dojo to let my students practice. And they create it and they put it out there and the students can download it and they go ahead and do it. We're looking to create continually increasing content and going with a subscription model for World of Haiku so that people continually have new challenges in there, so that we're never going to have anybody saying, hey, I've been through the whole game. When we first released, we had people go, I've been through the whole game. It's like, hold on, we just launched it. We're coming out with more content. We had to figure out what worked and what didn't work. But now we're going to have the ability to have continually refreshed content. Our Haiku Pro, we've got ranges in there. You know, we're going to continually add new ranges. We're aggressively pursuing partnerships with universities. In addition to San Diego State University, we're reaching out. If anybody's listening on this podcast and you work for Universe and you want to learn more about how to add haiku, please reach out haiku pro.com, submit the form, or heck, just reach out to Neil and he'll give you my email and you can email me ebassooiku range.com and I think it's just. It's really the next thing to help universities differentiate themselves from their competitors and say, you know, okay, I mean, you say, what do you have? I've got a certification program for cyber security. Okay, so so does everybody else. What do you do? Oh, we actually give them a CISSP or CIEH or Security plus certification at the the end of it, okay, you know, everybody else does that too. They start to, you know, not have anything. Do you actually give something with hands on training throughout the entire course as well as a prequel to the course and after that? No, we don't have anything like that. Well, you can add this for literally, I mean, a fraction of the cost of your course. You could do that. Do you have something that actually allows the students to be able to present the Hands on Skills, the number of hours they've spent at Hands on Skills to employers at the end? No, no. How do we get that? You have a way to connect your students to jobs that they'll have so that they're not graduating from the certificate, then showing up at a job fair going, hey, what's a SOC analyst? You know, they're going to know all these jobs before they get to that job fair and they're going to go in there and say, I understand your company has a soc analyst level two. I believe I qualify for that because I have 100 hours of hands on SOC analyst training. I'd love to apply for the job. I mean, you're going to prepare your students for much higher job placement rates. They're just going to be, you know, much better at what they do. You're going to have university. I mean, employers come back, you go, man, again, all your students, they add value from day one. We really, really like your students and I think that's where we're going. I really want to help. I want to help universities really renovate what they're doing in cyber security. And so that they're not competing with trihack me or, you know, some of these others, they're actually providing more value from their certifications than they were before and certainly than their competitor. You know, the universities, they're competing what they're doing.

Well, congratulate on you on that. I think you'd know that obviously Lisa Easterly, who you mentioned, Cybersecurity center of Excellence and, and our friends at the EDC continuously look at how many open roles there are or roles that are just in demand and can't get filled. And I seemingly feel like you're creating a whole new talent pool that maybe wouldn't have gotten through the system, maybe would have fallen through the cracks because there was only one way to find your way into the cyber world. And this, whether it's for you or not, you're finding your way to get qualified. So huge boots that you're filling there.

We're trying really, really hard. We're trying to make sure that we carry these people from one end, we don't draw them through there. And not only, but we bring more people into the funnel too. People that play the game. This is one thing I've told universities. People that play the game might not have wanted to get into cybersecurity. And they do it, and they're like, this is fun, because we don't have enough people entering the funnel right now, so hopefully we're bringing more people into that as well.

Absolutely. Were you. Would you call yourself a gamer before haiku?

100%, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, my two sons, I mean, my sons actually talk about the times we play video games from the time they were young, played World of Warcraft, we played City of Heroes. And I gotta say, it helps quite a bit. I mean, sometimes it sounds silly, but I'll do research for haiku by playing games. That was actually how I came up with the idea for the side missions. I was playing a game called Destiny 2, which is, I guess, kind of old, but that's okay. I'm old, so I can play old games. And they have something called Vanguard missions, where you go in there and you kill 15 minutes before dinner or something like that. And they're sitting there going through it and thinking they spawn different monsters, different maps, different treasure every time. But I become an expert in this particular set of things because I've done it 200 times, and I thought, what if we do this for a particular command, a particular cyber security command, we allow somebody to go back there and respawn a different network every time, but they get to practice that command over and over and over again. It's a. It's a tried and true way video games teach us. And so we did that. And nobody's done it before. Nobody even thought about doing it. And Gerald Augur, Dr. Gerald Augur out of South Carolina, he works with us and he streams a lot of our things. Sometimes he's kind of like this dojo thing. He goes, this is. This is really cool. I'm like, yeah, it's just an idea I got when I was playing a video game. But I said, you're right, this is really cool. And again, nobody else has it. Nobody else has a repeatable side mission because nobody else has built a video game, an actual video game that is, you know, that's a cyber that teaches cyber security. Well, we're.

We were long overdue for new talent tech tools also, because man instruction has not advanced. Neither has, like, the linkedins of the world and job boards, either. So, you know, I think you're on. If cyber is what you probably could do, do 10 years of just this in cyber. But I gotta imagine this is applicable to many other industries. So I'm excited to continue to see how haiku grows. As you're building companies and as people are getting hired and working in industry, we all gotta eat. And this being the Tacos Tech podcast, our listeners demand to know, where do you go for tacos at the end of the day?

I live in Henderson, Nevada, and the number one taco place here is Magusta Tacos in Green Valley. Excellent creative. They do a mix of Korean Albi, Korean barbecue, other things. And I'll warn you on the hot. I actually like hot stuff. I cannot eat their habanero sauce. It. It's. It's hot.

Really? Okay.

Yeah. Magusta Tacos in the district in Green Valley.

Oh, I love Kalbi tacos too. That sounds excellent.

Makes my mouth water.

Sounds like I need to make a trip out to. To hang out with you in Vegas sometimes.

Please do.

Eric, congratulations on. I don't know if I can call it a new venture, but new for you. Very excited for me to jump in and play it as well too. And thank you for helping chart a course for so many new cybersecurity professionals. So appreciate it.

Thank you.

Cheers. Thanks so much.

Cheers.

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