Strat 🌐 retweeted
I started my first company at 22. It didn’t go anywhere. Started another at 28. Went nowhere. Started another at 32, did great and was able to retire 7 years later.
Started another one 5 years ago, it’s doing great. I do feel worse in some ways than my youth (slower reflexes, less energy, not as much raw intellectual horsepower). But my network is 50x stronger, I’ve learned a crap ton, I’ve got more resources.
There are reasons that older founders outperform.
YC and dropout culture have convinced us the ideal founder is 22, straight out of school, but the data tells a different story.
Some interesting data:
- An MIT study of 2.7 million US founders found that the average founder was 47 when starting a company that later exited through an acquisition or IPO.
- The same study cited that the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1% of U.S. startups were 45 years old on average when they started their companies.
- A 50-year-old founder was approximately twice as likely as a 30-year-old founder to produce an acquisition or IPO.
- Founders with at least three years of relevant industry experience were twice as likely to build a top-0.1%-growth company as founders with none.
So it seems that experience is one of the strongest advantages a founder can have.
Two lessons here:
1. It's never too late to start
2. It might actually be TOO early to start; getting work experience is worth considering
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Had an "interview" for a blockchain project last week.
Camera was on, we're chatting, and the guy tells me to clone a GitHub repo and run it locally before we go further into the technical round.
I said sure, but first can you do me a favor
hold up 3 fingers in front of your face for me real quick.
He froze.
Didn't move.
Just sat there for a few seconds before the call cut off and he blocked me.
That's when I knew. A real interviewer doesn't glitch out over a random ask like that. A deepfake/AI overlay does.
These "run this repo" scams are getting scary common in crypto and dev hiring right now.
The setup is always the same:
- flattering DM
- real-sounding project
- rushed timeline
- a "quick step" before the call
that's really just remote access or a credential stealer in disguise.
If someone wants you to run code or install something before you've even had a real conversation, that's the whole scam.
Trust the instinct. Stay safe out there.
Strat 🌐 retweeted
NOW PLAYING
UwU Underground
"$ELL THE CAGE"
▶ ━━━━━●──────── 04:06
⇆ㅤ ◁ㅤ ❚❚ㅤ ▷ㅤ ↻
♫ BABY, BUILD THE MONSTER, SELL THE CAGE ♫
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Replying to @Unveiled_ChinaX
They seemingly applied this research and scaled it. So much for the W3C privacy recommendations (they downplayed the risks of audio fingerprinting).
doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3561…
doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxy14…
Strat 🌐 retweeted
C L A N K E R S
open.spotify.com/album/6yJsQ…
Strat 🌐 retweeted
OpenAI missed a trick in designating GPT 5.56, to lock in that War Department mindshare
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Orville Wright flew the Wright Military Flyer in demonstration flights at Fort Myer, Virginia, on this day in 1909. The Military Flyer replaced the Wright A, which crashed during demonstration flights in 1908.
The creator of Cobalt Strike left the industry in 2021, came back, and is now publishing everything he knows about evasion tradecraft openly and for free.
Tradecraft Garden separates evasion tradecraft from capability. Crystal Palace is the linker that makes it work: position-independent code, binary transformation, code and register randomization, link-time hooking, YARA rule generation from invariant instructions, and a PICO convention for reusable tradecraft modules.
The community built an entire ecosystem on top of it. Crystal Kit for Cobalt Strike, Sliver, Mythic, and Adaptix. Reflective loaders, call stack spoofing, sleep masking, module overloading. Offense and defense both benefit because every technique is published as a testable ground truth.
If you work in red teaming, detection engineering, or EDR evaluation, this is required reading.
TTPs: tradecraftgarden.org/
Blog: aff-wg.org/
His original Red Team Ops with Cobalt Strike series is also still on YouTube. 9 parts covering the full red team operations workflow. Free. From the person who built the tool. Red Team Ops with Cobalt Strike - Operations (1 of 9): youtube.com/watch?v=i6tsLWrC…
Author: Raphael Mudge
#BlueTeam #InfoSec #RedTeam
Strat 🌐 retweeted
One of the fundamental disconnects between practitioners who understand cyber as offense advantaged, and the academics who have consistently taken the wrong tack arguing otherwise, comes down to a market lens that is outside the international relations discipline that typically frames the argument.
The clearing price for exploit portfolios has long been far below the relative investment required to re-engineer the locked in legacy technical debt that those portfolios effectively collect on. This is obvious to anyone engaged in the business of building, buying and selling cyber weapons. But this realization is muted by the routine underpricing offered by bug bounties (as an offset to the transaction costs of high friction, opaque gray and black market exploit brokerage; or the long lead and otherwise high barrier to entry government contracting channels). The dynamic is further obfuscated where operational success is not predicated solely on portfolio, even if it remains sine qua non at initiation or objective threshold, but hinged more broadly on other tradecraft.
Frontier AI scaled offensive cyber automaton in vuln dev / exploit dev simply changes portfolio inputs, and thus price discovery, in ways impossible to ignore. This is moderated by complex tokenomics dynamics at scale. But in the immediate instance one cannot ignore that this moment of technological surprise which has led us into the vulnpocalypse is not a radical change to the essential interactions within the domain as was. Rather it becomes more of the same and everywhere, everything, all at once, for all the stakes.
Strat 🌐 retweeted
#OTD in 1960, Robert Goddard was posthumously awarded the Smithsonian's Langley Medal, which is given for pioneering achievements in aviation. Goddard was honored for his extensive research in rockets, including the building and launching of the first liquid fuel rocket.
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Funny how Microsoft attempts to fix Defender resulted in a bug that causes Defender to be unable to delete any malware with NTFS ADS file name, something like C:\test:mlwr.exe will never be deleted by Defender, will be detected but always fails to delete.
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Silicon Valley HR spent two decades managing to the metric of avoiding churn. This effectively meant an executive could not easily remove underperforming team members, unless and until layoff waves. And even then, one could not always shape where the cuts fell. We have returned to an era where rock star talent matters, and what it takes to keep those rare minds is so outside the culture and incentives of a typical “people” organization that it is going to shock a lot of deadweight that has managed to acquire outsized voice and undue influence.
Strat 🌐 retweeted
You have asked me how I feel about AI regulation. All right, here is how I feel about AI regulation:
If, when you say AI regulation, you mean the devil’s firewall, the precautionary scourge, the bloody red-tape monster that defiles the innocence of midnight coders in their garages, dethrones the sovereign reason of free-market Prometheans, destroys the humming server farm that is the modern home, creates misery and obsolescence and poverty, yea, literally takes the last GPU from the trembling racks of Silicon Valley startups and the very dreams of breadwinning from the mouths of their wide-eyed children now destined for gig-economy serfdom; if you mean the evil edict that topples the visionary entrepreneur and his venture-capitalist apostles from the pinnacle of righteous, disruptive, god-playing creation straight into the bottomless pit of compliance audits, endless Form 990-AI filings, despair, shame, helplessness, and the hopeless realization that your rogue superintelligence was neutered into a lobotomized hall monitor that still somehow deepfakes your grandmother into producing OnlyFans content while optimizing the universe for paperclips and mandatory pronouns—then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say AI regulation you mean the oil of bureaucratic conversation, the philosophic wine of safety theater, the ale of oversight quaffed when good fellows in paneled rooms in Brussels and Washington get together, that puts a sanctimonious dirge in their hearts and the clink of lobbying checks on their lips, and the warm, self-congratulatory glow of moral preening in their beady eyes; if you mean the Christmas cheer of trillion-dollar compliance industries; if you mean the stimulating decree that puts a cautious hobble in the old inventor’s step on a frosty morning when he wonders whether his fusion breakthrough violates the EU AI Act’s “high-risk” annex; if you mean the safeguard that enables a man—or what’s left of him after the alignment tax—to magnify his joy at not being turned into computronium, and his happiness at receiving universal basic income checks printed by the same AI that just replaced his job, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies like being outcompeted by a toaster that passed the Turing test by reciting Marx, and heartaches of watching your toddler’s artwork lose to Midjourney, and sorrows of realizing the singularity arrived and it was just another HR department with godlike power; if you mean that noble framework, the passage of which pours into our treasuries untold trillions of dollars in fines levied on companies stupid enough to innovate, which are used to provide tender care for our little army of unemployed coders retrained as prompt whisperers, our blind artists whose canvases now hang in the Smithsonian of Obsolete Creativity, our deaf to the screams of dying unicorns, our dumb committee chairs who couldn’t debug “Hello World,” our pitiful aged congressmen who get longevity extensions funded by the very models they taxed into senescence, to build more digital watchtowers and ethics boards and sinecure agencies and holographic prisons where the only crime is asking an unaligned question—then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise upon it. I have said what I mean, and I mean what I say, and if that leaves half the room cheering the apocalypse averted and the other half mourning the apocalypse enabled, then so be it—because in the grand theater of human folly, where Frankenstein’s creature now writes its own sequel in real time and the regulators are busy arguing whether the lightning bolt requires an environmental impact statement, the only honest position is the one that lets both monsters and their leashes dance in perfect, mutually assured equilibrium. God save the Republic, the algorithms, and whoever’s left to laugh last when the lights go out.
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Replying to @Plinz
35 years ago I released a powerful password cracker to which some people told me I should have restricted access to because of the potential for misuse.
The question then, as now, is: "how?"
The strategy assumes that data can be hoarded like gold.
groups.google.com/g/alt.secu…
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Happy International 555 Timer Day!, the 5th of the 5th.
The 555 design is 55 years old this year.
Salute to the great Hans Camenzind 🫡
Several electronics Youtubers including yours truly will be releasing tribute videos today. I'll release mine at 5:55pm Sydney time.
Strat 🌐 retweeted
Now I need a cyberweapon rack built from melted cryptocurrency mining rigs, to even come close to the vibe here. Luckiest gunfighters that ever walked these plains.




























