Casey Ellis, Founder of BugCrowd: When Known Vulnerabilities are Life or Death

Casey Ellis (0:01)

My favorite definition of a founder is someone who gets irrationally pissed off about a problem they think they can solve. That was the irrationally pissed off part. It's like these are just dumb problems for the Internet to have, and we're getting hosed by the baddies when they want to do bad things, and that's only going to get more and more true. As the Internet expands, the threat actors diversify. So these are all the things that are bouncing around my head before I pulled the trigger on BugCrowd.

Jon Sakoda (0:25)

Welcome to The Decibel Podcast. I'm excited to welcome my friend Casey Ellis to the show. Casey is the founder of BugCrowd. He is the pioneer of commercial bug bounties. He's also a friend of many founders and made hacking a legitimate profession for so many of us. Casey, welcome to The Decibel Podcast.

Casey Ellis (0:44)

Thanks, Jon. Excited to be here. G'day.

Jon Sakoda (0:46)

I guess that is a great segue to where did you grow up? Tell me about what your parents did, how you eventually found computers. Give me all the details.

Casey Ellis (0:55)

Yeah, sure. Backstory-wise, I am from originally from Sydney, Australia. I live now in the Bay Area, but yeah, that's where you hear the funny accent from. It's definitely curved off a little bit. I get crap for sounding like an American when I go back home now, because I roll the Rs and do all those different things. But yeah, so how did I get started? Probably the biggest thing was, I was very obviously a super curious kid from a very young age, and my parents, to their credit, kind of identified that and just pretty much did whatever they could to foster it and give me opportunity, right? Like my dad at the time was a science teacher. He would take me out of school in kind of elementary school and bring me to high school and different things like that. And then at some point, a computer came home, and that's when that all started. But prior to that, I was tearing apart electronics and radios and a lot of other stuff. There was just a really strong set of really good conditions to kind of nurture that sort of creativity and that sort of hacker side of thinking. Mom's a clinical psychologist. They're both very much kind of entrepreneurs in their own right. So there was a little bit of that DNA that I figured out kind of later on in life. So that's how that all got kind of got kicked off.

Jon Sakoda (2:04)

How did you eventually learn how to hack things? And then how did your parents feel about that?

Casey Ellis (2:12)

Yeah, the second one's probably a little bit more interesting. Look, it was BBS. That's kind of the generation.

Jon Sakoda (2:18)

Of course, of course.

Casey Ellis (2:19)

Yeah, I finished school in 99 So that's that sort of gives you an idea of part of the the Oregon trail generation that kind of started school completely analog and ended basically digital. You know, kind of prior to that, I was just monkeying about with stuff, like learning how to code in basic, you know, figuring out that there was some sort of program backdoors and Apple 2Es that you could use to get the computer to do stuff it wasn't necessarily designed to do or designed in an obvious way to do. And, you know, once I started sort of discovering that stuff in computer science land, I was kind of hooked. Parts of that kind of coincided with, you know, teenage years and just getting a little bit rebellious generally. Like I was in the crowd that were all very much kind of rebels and didn't really care too much about rules and took as many opportunities as we could to break rules just based on them being there in the first place. And I think, you know, hacking kind of folded into that.

There was a lot of, you know, bypassing of filters on school computers and different things like that. And my parents were definitely not super happy about that.

Jon Sakoda (3:24)

This sounds really familiar. A lot of our guests started out hacking and sounds like you were also in a referent child. Mom didn't sound super happy. But I think I remember reading somewhere that you somehow went to school eventually to get a degree in nuclear medicine. How exactly did that come about?

Casey Ellis (3:43)

Yeah, it was so nuclear physics. And to me, like physics is like basically applied math, right? So, you know, the idea of of like nuclear physics, I for some reason got kind of caught up on that when I was probably in year six or year seven, maybe. And it was just I was just fascinated by it. I just loved it just kind of gripped me because this idea of of being able to distil things down to their most primitive kind of fundamentals, but then not going any further than that to the point where you actually alter the nature of what you're talking about. Like that's a principle I still apply today. That's probably more of a brain wiring thing than it is anything else. And then went to university for like six weeks. Loved it, loved learning, loved like the social aspect, loved the community, all those different things. But it was just a matter of like, yeah, like this just doesn't feel like it in terms of what I want to spend the next six years of my life doing to kind of get to the end of. I think partly it was just a like, I actually don't think that tertiary education was for me in the first place. Just the idea that like my learning style is pretty non-linear and trying to cram it into like a linear system for the next six years after I just spent 12 years in high school, kind of basically skirting around the edges of all of it as much as I possibly could. It just didn't seem to make sense.