 From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and theCUBE is really mostly about people, about network and so we're going to have a focus in. We're going to talk about some technology. I was going to talk a little bit about careers. Want to welcome to the program. I've got two first time guests on the program. First, Mark Spikowski, probably butchered that badly. Mark, sorry, technical advisor and blue Gaston Gaston. Boy, I'm doing horrible with names here. Software engineer, you're both with Polyverse, but my last name's Miniman. It had been butchered a million time, but Mark and blue, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. Our pleasure. All right, so one of you I've read a lot about online and the other one is Mark who has a Wikipedia page and stuff like that. We'll get to that too. So blue, maybe to start with you, give us a little bit about your background. Yeah, so I work at Polyverse now, Cybersecurity startup, but actually I got my undergraduate degree in philosophy and from there, kind of just like, what am I going to do with a philosophy degree? It just weirdly was like a natural transition. I was like, oh, computer science and the kind of the logical, like the technical version of philosophy. So got my masters in philosophy and now have, or not philosophy in computer science and now I've been working at Polyverse. I started as an intern and they hired me on, I think after a month, they were like, nope, we want you full time. So that was cool and I've loved it. So I'm starting off my story. That's kind of where my kickoff point is. So, and Mark, first of all, you have to give us the connection between yourself and blue and a little bit surprising that she waited so long to go into the computer business. Okay, I'm first step father. It's not surprising that she wanted to go into computer science. She's got lots of aptitude for it. She was just on a career path and an education path that was primarily logic analysis, which is basically what we do in computer science. All right, so Mark, if you could just give our audience a little bit of a thumbnail sketch as to your background in the tech industry and it's a storied one. Okay, I was, I think employee number 55 at Microsoft when I started back in 1981. The first task that they gave me was to work on something that ended up becoming MS-DOS. I worked on MS-DOS for a long time, about five and a half years. Worked on a number of other operating systems at Microsoft, ending up with being one of the initial developed managers and architects for Windows. I was responsible for all file storage. And I was there for about 26 years. Yeah, interesting. When you look on the Wikipedia page, you were the third employee that reached the 25-year milestone. Some guy, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were the first two to reach that milestone. So, quite impressive. I think back when I learned computers, it was programming and today it's coding and things are quite different there. But Mark, you were also, you noted as one of the early hackers there. So what does that mean to you? How have you seen that been changing? Polyverse is in the cybersecurity realm. So, we love your kind of viewpoint on just hacking in general. Well, the early days, well, my hacking started pretty much when I was in eighth or ninth grade back in Detroit. We had access to an academic operating system called MTS by way of Wayne State University. I grew up just in the suburbs of Detroit. And we had access to it and for me, excuse me, hacking at the time was all about trying to understand and learn stuff that was arcane and hidden and mysterious. Figuring out how, for example, password encryption, algorithms work, figuring out how operating systems worked because at the time, there were very few organized textbooks about how to construct operating systems, even though the operating systems had been around for 20 years. So, my earliest stop was in basically finding holes in security at MTS and that's how I started what they would say, hacking, but it was very innocent, it was very, let's see what we can do as opposed to let's extract information, let's go in and ransom people's data for Bitcoin, which is, I think, the wrong direction to go. Yeah, I'm curious, your thoughts as the decade to progress, hacking today, what would you take on as the white hats and the black hats and everything in between? It's kind of an arms race. Everything that the white hats will throw up, the black hats will eventually attack to some degree. Social engineering is sort of the ultimate way that people have been getting around software protections. I think it's unfortunate that there is such a financial award to the black hat side of things as counter to one's ethics. I think there's a lot of slippery slopes involved in terms of, boy, these companies shouldn't be making money, so I deserve my bit. I think that it's much better that people should come at this from an intellectual exploration standpoint rather than an exploitative, but that's the nature of the world. Yeah, well, Blue, maybe we can help connect the dots towards what you both do at Polyverse. You mentioned, you started as an intern and I love the article I talked about. They said, well, you're gonna be an intern. Can you fix the internet for us? And you did some things to help stop some of that malicious hacking. Yeah, that was crazy. I was very intimidated when I heard that. You're gonna be fixing the internet. What I've been working on at the company, which is different from our flagship product, but kind of in the same vein, is to stop malicious PHP JavaScript code execution. So that's what they came in. That's how they prefaced that problem to me. It was, you're gonna go fix the internet. And it was crazy. It was really cool and surprisingly, like a lot of philosophy that goes like into the way we look at our problem solving at Polyverse and how we tackle problems. But of course, I have my Jedi master mark over here and I was constantly, what do you think about this? Isn't this crazy? Look at how Polyverse is attacking this. And I think finally I broke him down and I was like, come join, come jump in and you be the foresight and you tell us what we're gonna do in a year or two. And I convinced him and now he's with us too. Excellent, so Mark, tell us a little bit about more about Polyverse, your role there. In the industry, there's a lot of talk about lots of money obviously get spent on cybersecurity but it's still a major challenge in the industry. So what's your role there and how's Polyverse helping to attack that? Well, my title list is technology advisor and I'm one of a small collection of people who have pretty wide-ranging expertise across operating systems, networks, compilers, languages, development tools, all of that. And our goal is, you know, my role as well as the other Jedi masters is to take a look at what Polyverse is doing at present, try to figure out where we need to go, try to figure out what the next set of challenges are, use sort of our broad experience and knowledge of the computing milieu and try to figure out what are the tough issues we need to face. We make some progress on those tough issues and then turn everything over for the main line, Polyverse development staff to bring into reality. We're not like researchers, we're much more into the product planning side of things but product planning in, I hate to use this word, but in a visionary sense. Yeah, no, we look for the vision, we're not visionaries, we look for the vision. You're a visionary, Mark. Admit it. Excellent, well, I do love the Jedi analogy there. When you look at, curious your thoughts, both of you, some of the real challenges and opportunities facing, the cybersecurity industry, I say large financial industry company, they'll spend a billion dollars and does that make them secure? Well, at least they've done what they can and they're pushing enough pieces. But fundamentally, we understand that this is such a huge issue. I think, I can try to answer. I think Polyverse recognizes that as well. So we're trying to create new solutions that instead of just being compliant and checking the boxes, we're actually trying to create systems and products that will stop attacks from actually working. Rather than being reactive and being responsive, we're trying to build these systems out where the attacks just don't work as they are currently designed. And I think we, and to do so in an easy to deploy time saving kind of way, is definitely our goal to rather, rather than the status quo and we're fighting inertia, we're trying to change that narrative in a really meaningful way. Thanks, Blue. Mark, do you have some comments you can add to that? Once we started taking individual computers and hooking them up to the internet, where they can communicate fairly freely with each other and by intent communicate fairly freely with each other, by design, by intent, all of a sudden that opened us to just a wide range of malicious behavior, from being gossed to leaking passwords, et cetera. There are, there's layers and layers that one can do to mitigate these problems from IT operational manuals to plus testing your API to best practices. There's a long list and every bit of, every piece of it is important. You need to secure your passwords before you can do anything else. You need to make sure that there's a firewall in your system before you even start thinking about doing things like what's going on with what we're doing at Polyverse. It's a, like I said, there's a wide range of tools that people need, that people use, that people spend money on today. Polyverse has got a very unique perspective on how to go and extend this week. It's very pragmatic and understand, the realization is that these attackers are gonna keep attacking and they're gonna exploit certain features that despite everyone's best intentions aren't covered and we have found a rather unique and novel way to prevent people from doing it. Is it gonna solve everything? No, there's all these other early layers that need to be taken care of first before we, before the more sophisticated tools that, for example, Polyverse has or that other companies have. Great, well, Blue, you talked a little bit about it, but what you've found, working together as a family dynamic here, specifically. I think it's really cool. What's the best, I'll say this, is when, I always like asking Mark his opinion because why wouldn't I, the brain that guy has and just the experience he can add so much. Every once in a while, I'll go and I'll say, oh, this is what I'm working on and here's what I'm kind of thinking and I'll say, oh, yeah, well, what about this? And I'll actually get to explain something to him. And that feels really good is when I get to say, oh, well, actually it looks like this and this was my plan and he's like, oh, yeah, definitely. And I get that validation, which is really cool. And I can drive to this house and bug him whenever I want to. I know where he lives if I'm really stuck or just want to bounce ideas off of him. It's really cool, it's really cool. And I, you know, strong arm, no, strong arm. I enticed him to come and join Polyverse just by the cool things that we're doing. And I think that's cool too, to now be able to work on something together. Yeah, and Mark, that sounds like you're learning some things from Blue. Can you give us your side of that relationship? Well, it's a great relationship. Blue never hesitates to challenge. Okay. And I'm saying it in a very positive sense. You know, she'll come up, you know, every so often I'll get a text from her that says, How, oh my God. Yeah, sorry, at least I'm not showing it. But it's great and, you know, we get together and we talk about stuff and, you know, she says, you know, here's the problem I'm facing and I'll ask her about it and she gets to go and teach me about what her problem is. I'm a big fan of teaching. You know, I don't think, I think one of the frustrations Blue has is I almost never give her the answer when she asks a question. No, not even when I was in school. Yeah, not even when you were in school. I was always asking the questions and leading her to the answer rather than just giving it to her. Or saying, well, why don't we sit down and I'll teach you how to implement knowledge? Just like, oh my God. What are you doing? Yeah, so, yeah, I'm a big fan of teaching and learning by way of teaching, one of the things I do is I'm an affiliate with the University of Washington and I teach every year one quarter of their operating systems class. And I love teaching, I love seeing the light go on, but every year when I'm teaching a class that I know pretty well, I learn something new by a question the student asks or by, you know, reading a paper that I'm asking the students to read. I learn something new just about every year. And so having Blue teach me, okay, is a way that I get to learn. But I think in the process, Blue also gets to learn as well, you know, in the process of teaching me. Yeah, that's such a great point. All right, I want to give you both just the final word on, you know, what's exciting you, you know, what draws you to, you know, working in the cybersecurity industry. I'll start. So when I started at Polyverse, I actually got to, as an intern, own my own product. And in, I think less than a month now, we're actually officially releasing that product, polyscripting, officially like marketing is coming up with materials for it. And that was right out of school is when I started on this project. So it's kind of like a big deal for me. You know, I've owned the project, I'd say like 90% of it over the last year or two, and now I get to see it come into fruition. So that's really exciting to me. You know, that's exciting. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited about what Polyverse is doing in general. So, yeah. And Mark, yeah, it's great working in a startup. It's great working with a bunch of very, very bright, energetic people. For me, contributing to that environment is extremely valuable. Helping Polyverse out there, cybersecurity is a problem. Trying to come up with good, effective solutions that are really pragmatic in terms of, we're not going to solve every problem, but here's a great little space that we're going to solve all the problems in. There's a huge appeal to that for me. Well, Mark and Blue, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate you sharing some of the, you know, personal as well as the professional journeys that you've both been on. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. All right. Thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching.