Pat Wilbur CTO of Hologram.io

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I want to continue to express gratitude to all of our listeners. Every day, I get to wake up and live my dream of bringing value to you and the next generation of technology leaders. When you tell your friends and colleagues about the Modern CTO podcast, we grow and gain momentum. I want to ask you to continue spreading the word.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) Please tell your friends at your tech meetups and anyone else who you know who's interested in hearing from the greatest technology leaders on earth. The more we grow, the more value we can bring you on a day-to-day basis, and that, my friends, is what I live for. So once again, I wanted to say thank you. Now speaking of value, get ready for a value-packed interview as today we are talking to Pat Wilbur, the CTO of Hologram.io. And we discussed the future of 5G and what it means for the consumer market, the importance of bringing an in-house designer in as quickly as possible, and what steps are needed to address IoT security.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. First of all, I want to tell you how much I absolutely love the design.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:01:18) Oh, thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) It's so good.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:01:23) Thank you. If I can be kind of humble, we do actually receive a lot of praise for the design, but still appreciate it. That's been a little while in coming. When we first—I'm not going to bring it up, and please don't check us out on the Internet Archive Project to anybody listening to us. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:42) Well, now I am. We're live streaming it right now.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:01:46) But we—it's been a little while in coming. One piece of advice I'd give to any startup is to bring an in-house designer in as quickly as possible instead of always relying on consultants. It's just very hard to get to hit a really good understanding of the company vision. And you lack, if you don't have an internal designer, you also lack their input into user experience and common design elements across the whole platform there. If it's a consultant, they're more focused on project-based things. It's kind of hard to achieve the next level of design if you're just working with a design consultant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) Yeah. Well, it's that consistency and that whole team family aspect of moving the project forward and having to live with your decisions versus being a bullet point check off the list contract project.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:02:43) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) So I was really excited. I read through your—and just so you know, because I've gotten a couple of questions about it recently, we are recording. Like, this is the podcast.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:02:52) This is the real deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) Yeah. Yeah. This is it. We just hang out. We talk. Right? And when we screw up, we just make sure to highlight that section in the notes.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:03:02) Cool. No. That's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:03) I was reading your interview on your blog that you guys did as a series of Hologrammers. And they asked you all these questions. And man, that is so smart because it allows me to get to know you and your people before even speaking to you. And it is rare that a guest has one of those. So when I read it, I was like, this is so cool, man. I got to see you crossing a beaver dam, trying to retrieve some satellite data. What was that?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:03:32) Yeah. So a good friend of mine, college friend, and I got into amateur ballooning before it was cool. We started sending up near space weather balloons, high altitude balloons, to photograph the Earth. And, you know, it's just one of those things we were like, well, we're just going to do this. We're going to try to figure it out. We'll order up some balloons if we can get these military supply companies to actually sell us them. And, you know, we'll just see if it makes it and if we can recover it. Yeah. So some of those photos, if you uncovered that, were us in the woods at night trying to recover the thing before the batteries die. That was a lot of fun. We had to charter a small plane to locate it because we lost contact mid-flight as it was landing. Probably some of the batteries or systems froze up. And so we had to charter a small plane to listen for one of our redundant beacons, find the thing, land the plane, drive into Adirondack Forest, basically, in the middle of the forest, and then go on an expedition quickly before the batteries died. So it was this—definitely don't recommend doing it at home, but this crazy off-trail swamp hike in the middle of the night with things making noise and growling and stuff. It was awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) It sounds like the intro trailer, like a new Call of Duty video game or something like that.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:04:58) Oh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) So I'm curious to know what is Hologram? What does it do? This way everyone can hear because I think I got it. You're basically allowing all the hackers or all the home people to Internet enable their devices through your SIM cards, but then you also provide lots of education and community around how to connect your devices to IoT. Is that right?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:05:24) Yeah. Absolutely. So, yeah, Hologram, we founded it basically as a cellular IoT company. Very developer focused, maker focused too, because, well, anyone who's developing, even in the enterprise, with this kind of stuff is also a maker or also working with hardware very closely or what have you. So we do have a pretty significant developer community. We also cater to enterprise deployments. But it's basically just getting IoT devices connected. IoT is a very popular field right now, and it's right on the verge of just exploding in growth with both benefits and major problems that we're going to be facing because of that. And one of the things that a lot of companies aren't focusing on is the actual initial connection, which can be quite difficult. If, you know, if it's a mobile application, this thing's moving around, it's not going to be in range of Wi-Fi all the time, or even if you're building a product that could in theory be on a Wi-Fi connection, it's really hard to configure stuff. User experience matters. So we offer basically a turnkey plug and play, very simple to activate and deploy a device anywhere. And it'll just work anywhere in the world where 99% of people live, which happens to have cellular coverage. And we'll do that in a secure way. So that's kind of our pitch, but I don't think that's what we're here for today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:56) Oh, that is exactly what we're here for today. I'm super interested in what you do. It reminds me of when I saw your—you were brand first, right? Because I came across Hologram. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:06) And I was like, oh my goodness. This is like if Stripe and Heroku had a baby that was an IoT company.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:07:14) Yeah. We've used that example. We want to be—telco's not a sexy thing. Most people would agree who are in tech who know anything about telco. Telco doesn't, you know, people kind of have this stigma with telco where it doesn't really change much. It doesn't really advance much. The reality is, we need it. Just like any ISP, you need that infrastructure. So you can think of it as like being like a Stripe for connectivity, for telcos, or for cellular operators, where maybe dealing with an operator directly is not going to be the best experience for you because they don't understand you or they're not providing the tools you need. But we can wrap around that, and we can provide a common experience across hundreds of operators worldwide. So Stripe is a great example of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:07) Yeah. I did a project three years ago where there was these things like OBD-II connectors. Oh, yeah. I think that's what they're called. And some a local shop was also entrepreneurial, and they wanted me to Internet enable one of these connectors and transmit data. And this was actually five—oh my goodness. Five or seven years ago. Oh, man. Sorry. Time slippage. So I started researching this and getting into it, and it was not easy, man. I had to order some—it was like a drug deal trying to get the chips and everything set up and go around. And everything was in brown, unstyled, unlogoed boxes, and it was just like every vendor had a little chip or a piece of equipment they would throw at you and just say figure it out, do it. And this was only five or seven years ago. And then when I—so when I saw you, I guess, you know, that was one of the things that made me really excited is like, oh, man. I wish these guys had existed back then. Look at all these resources.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:09:10) Yeah. No. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) How are things going to change with 5G? Is that going to—are you thinking about that? Is that big in your world right now?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:09:18) Yeah. So people are just starting to talk up 5G really heavily in the industry. 5G, it's all about driving many, many more connections, or higher connection density, and also simultaneously driving ridiculous throughputs. So the cellular network is—ever since basically 4G, at least by 4G, it's been very software defined. It's using some really advanced radio technologies, very advanced antenna technologies. 5G is like the nth degree of that. So it's basically just, how can we make networks that are going to handle millions or billions more of IoT devices than, you know, than we've ever seen in one geographic area, while at the same time being able to keep up with consumer applications, which tend to be more bandwidth heavy. So 5G is kind of this adaptable wireless fabric or spectrum. And that's kind of the goal of 5G. So it's going to be huge. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:30) Yeah. I was out at RSA, and my Uber driver was telling me, he goes, if you think this is crazy, because there was 40 to 50,000 people there, he says, you should see it when Salesforce comes here because they have 120,000. He says, it makes the Ubers sometimes not work well because they can't get their Internet connection. They're all competing because of the density.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:10:50) Right. Yeah. No. That makes perfect sense. The—there are a lot of assumptions that 3G and 4G made before the IoT boom. And now, you know, you can almost say that technology is kind of outpacing the network's ability to adapt. 5G is going to be, you know, attempting to address some of that stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) So will you have to change your devices at all? Like, how do you address that as a business? I don't know much about it, so I'm kind of hoping you're going to educate me real quick.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:11:23) Yeah. So to use 5G, you have to change the devices. A 4G device can't really use a 5G network. That doesn't mean 4G networks are going to go away anytime soon. But one of the best things on the network side is since 4G is very software defined, some telcos literally can do software updates to towers to start enabling new features. I don't know to what extent they can switch from 4G to 5G because that really depends upon if they've been preparing their deployments for this for a while, but it will help make the transition smoother. So the good news is that the network side, network support will be able to adopt 5G relatively quickly. And then on the consumer and IoT side, you'll just need devices to start catching up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) So when do they hit? Like, when do 5G devices start—when can I start buying 5G devices?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:12:19) It hasn't really been announced, so not quite sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:25) There's a little—

(Pat Wilbur at 00:12:26) Chicken and egg.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:27) —by the way.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:12:28) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:29) Yeah. Why? Because they don't have the 5G towers, and then who's buying the 5G devices? Or—

(Pat Wilbur at 00:12:35) Yeah. So the—I mean, there are module makers that have deployed experimental 5G networks and are working on 5G hardware in-house, you know, in a testing environment. But there aren't any hard dates right now on any of that stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:53) Do you guys showcase your customers' work? Like, do you have an Instagram where if people are building stuff with the Hologram chipsets or any of the things you sell that you show it off? I know you have a community tab, but I didn't dive too far into it.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:13:07) Yeah. So we do a little bit of that, especially on Twitter. And then we also have a projects page where people will submit project ideas. We've actually run a few contests on there, so that's interesting to check out. People, on the projects page, submit basically a how-to, how to build whatever they're building. So that's very maker community focused. And then we often showcase things that our customers are doing on social media.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:37) That's awesome. And how large is the Hologram team currently?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:13:41) Yeah. We're, I think we're at 22 people, last I checked. So more than when we started. We've grown fairly quickly over the past few years. We started end of 2013, beginning of 2014 with basically the initial cofounder. A CEO was the founder, and then he brought me on as a cofounder right around that time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:02) Are you all mostly local? Are you hybrid? What's the division of your team like?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:14:07) Yep. Most of the team is located right in Chicago, downtown Chicago. Basically, a Midwest, you know, born and raised company. Nice. You know, the Midwest is really interesting place to build a business. And some of our investors are in the Midwest. They basically have started a fund in the Midwest and everything. And the idea is there's a lot of potential there. It's not a bad location. There are other companies nearby. But Silicon Valley, while it had a head start in being a major incubator for tech companies, might not really be holding that foothold very long or much longer. So the Midwest is kind of an exciting new frontier. It's almost like a gold rush to the Midwest right now being talked about, which is kind of a cool thing. So it's been—you know, it's neat to build a Midwest company, a nontraditional tech startup in the sense that it's not in Silicon Valley, but it's kind of in an emerging area for tech companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:16) That'd be Chicago, that area?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:15:19) Yeah. Chicago and right up and down there, you know, Columbus, I guess, probably would be included in that even though I like Chicago over Columbus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:27) Yeah. But they've got that big silver thing.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:15:29) Yeah. I don't know what it is, but they do have that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:32) Right? Yeah. It's—well, it's the thing you see on Instagram all the time. It's like, oh, that's Chicago.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:15:37) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37) Yeah. They're called—it's called the Bean. I'm just now informed it's called the Bean. Oh, and they also have the Sky Deck, don't they? Don't they have the Sky Deck?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:15:44) There's the Sky Deck, and you can—there's something that you can do if you want to experience what it would look like if you were falling off a building, which doesn't interest me. But Chicago's a really cool city. Great restaurants, good transit system, good people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) So the company they invest—they're trying to get business to the Midwest because you're right. Because, you know, I'm thinking about it. You got the Northeast. Right? I'm looking at a map now just to educate myself. So you got the Northeast. You got the New York. No question there. There's business there. You got Silicon Valley, which is the West.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) No question there. You got Austin, Texas, and Boston, which kind of like Northeast and South. Right? But it's like, where's the love for the Midwest? We need more companies building up there.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:16:24) No, exactly. And, you know, in defense of Silicon Valley, like, if you've got a bunch of talent and people who know one another, you can get direct intros to people, you can get referrals for hiring. Like, there's definitely almost like a critical mass type component, you know, to start a company where you have to have a powerful network. And if you're in a neighborhood that is a powerful network, that can be very advantageous.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:16:55) But there's definitely something shifting right now, and a lot of attention's kind of being pointed toward the Midwest as a new frontier for tech companies, which is cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:07) So how did you fall in love with technology? I see that you worked at IBM, but I want to go like, farther back. Like, what was your first experience with technology?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:17:16) Yeah. So, well, my dad—I've always had an interest in technology and business, leaning technology, though. Pretty much as far back as I can remember, my dad had his own business. Actually, he built and sold a couple, so he's had a couple successful exits. And right around when I was four or five, he had this thing called a personal computer, you know, that he was using for work.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:17:44) And this was like, I'm not—it's not necessarily pre-Internet, but it was definitely before Internet was in people's homes. This is like, before AOL. Right? And I remember, so my earliest memories of technology were remembering being with my dad, going over to his computer and him using a modem, this external box plugged into his computer, and dialing into a bulletin board system to be able to download like, supplier rate sheets for his business, to do like a nightly update so he could make sure his pricing and everything the next day made sense. So this is like, you know, before you had a central point for the Internet that you would dial into, you would dial into someone's individual server, or in this case, like a bulletin board system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:32) Mm-hmm.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:18:32) And it was like an online magazine with some messaging capabilities, and you'd download files. So you'd go, you'd find a file, you'd download it. And so I just remember him typing in these commands to the modem, what are called AT commands, to control the thing, to get the modem to dial out to a phone number. And that was kind of interesting. And then shortly after that, I was playing around on the computer because he loaded up a game and kind of showed me how to load up games and issue some commands.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:19:06) And this was probably when I was around five or six. And I was playing on the computer. At one point, he walked out of the room and I got interested. He had a list of like, common DOS commands that he'd be using. And I got interested in like, what some of the different commands did.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:19:23) And I ended up formatting his—the drive that his accounting system was on, which, like, just about probably—I don't even really know how bad it cost his business, but I think it took them months to recover from that incident. And following that, he decided that it was prudent since I had an interest in technology to get me my own computer, so I would not be using his business computer anymore. And then shortly after that, my brother-in-law, I actually credit him greatly in getting me interested in programming and stuff. He was a computer scientist slash computer engineer, working for Corning at the time, and he kind of introduced me to programming right around when I was seven. Showed me kind of how to view QBasic code on a game.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:20:18) And that really kicked it off. And so from there, I got interested in programming. Eventually, when we got the Internet, I was one of the first people in like, my class that had Internet access at home. So kind of became a computer hardware hacker, got really interested in web and Internet protocols and whatnot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) So when you and Ben, you guys started the company, I see he kind of started it, and then you guys were talking about—you knew him, then you joined here later. Like, what was that process like? Like, what was the reason for—was there a pain point? Like, how did it exactly come about?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:20:56) Yeah. No, that's a great question. So it really lines up well with the story that you told about like, trying to get a chip and trying to get connected.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:21:06) Ben and I both previously had worked in a capacity where we were trying for different companies, where we were trying to utilize a cellular network to connect devices. He was looking to utilize a cellular network because the product that they were building needed to be mobile. It needed to be somewhere where Wi-Fi wasn't. I was working in a capacity where we were trying to use a cellular network to basically circumvent local networks and to be able to enhance security so you could have like a more secure, more private wide area network. And both of us were finding, in those past lives, that we were having a really hard time getting connected to cellular networks, building the business relationships, even just getting a sample SIM that you could plug into a device and get connected and start building on was like a nightmare.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:22:07) So we met online. We're talking. He had gotten the idea of starting an IoT connectivity company, and we just started talking about meeting a few times, having dinner, talking about the concept. And we both had experience with this exact pain point, this problem of even getting a sample SIM is hard and not to mention then getting any sort of meaningful access or control or API access or what have you. And, yeah, just as we further that conversation, you know, we both felt it was the right time for somebody to do this, and we decided, yeah. Let's do this. Let's go down this insane journey that is growing a company. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:54) And how did you know when it was going to be viable? Like, at what—like, who were your first customers? How did you approach the market?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:23:02) Yeah. So, well, early on, it was definitely him and me trying to close deals. Right? And I think that's true with most companies when they start. You know, you close your first few deals, probably the founders are closing those deals. Right?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:23:21) And then you, at that point, are able to kind of demonstrate some viability. So we closed a few early deals. We engaged in a partnership with a company that was kind of a hardware company that needed a connectivity offering to bundle in with their product. Others were more like a more traditional sale, and then hit the road fundraising. And I was really blessed. Ben had a lot of experience in growth and experience in fundraising and things like that. So he really was able to land some great early investment in the company that then allowed us to do some hiring, finish—make the MVP, you know, more than useful for more than a use case or two, I guess, if you will. Make it an actual reasonable product, and then go from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:21) So were your first customers like, large enterprise adoptions where they would purchase a lot of them, or what did they look like?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:24:30) Yeah. We landed a couple fairly large customers and medium-sized customers early on that, you know, where we were able to sell them on the vision and sell them on, hey, you've got our phone numbers. You can call the CEO and the CTO when you've got a problem. You know, that's always—I think that's very similar with a lot of startups when you land your first few big ones. A lot of it is, they're taking a risk with you.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:25:00) But at the same time, they know that they're going to get more access and more, you know, more people's attention, if you will, by working with a smaller company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) So did you say, hey, you need this sort of platform because you have a large set of these IoT devices, and we're building this platform—to be our first customer. Did it go like that or no?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:25:24) No. In some ways, we were solving a problem that just didn't exist or where a solution just didn't exist. So that made it a little easier, I think. But, you know, the convincing was, hey, we have knowledge and experience in this area, and we can solve a pain point for you. If you work with us, we can make this a much better user experience or customer experience in that case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:52) And did you have a pretty positive—when you started setting up those meetings and going through it, were they pretty positive, or did you have to—did you get a little down because some people were like, not into it? How did you deal with that? Like, I'm kind of interested in the human side of it.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:26:06) Yeah. And that's a good question. So early on, I would say meeting with someone can be very useful for sales. So I think that in some ways we had it easy because we were accessible, available to meet, do a face-to-face closing of a deal if we needed to. So that was pretty easy.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:26:30) I actually think that more, a little later on, the bigger challenge was selling partners. So we're very reliant on, you know, network partners and things like that. Just selling people on our vision when we were kind of in that stage where we're still fairly small, but we felt we had a lot of growth potential. Getting the right partners early on that would agree with our vision, even if we didn't have volume, that was a bigger challenge to overcome. That took us a few iterations before we really landed that and were set to take off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:12) At RSA, security obviously is a huge thing. And my question—like, my thoughts when I was there and I knew I was going to be speaking with you is, like, what's the big threat? Like, what's going on with the IoT security? Because, like, tea kettles are getting hacked and, like, it seems like there can be a lot going on.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:27:29) Yeah. So IoT security is big. People are like, kind of numb to computer security discussions in some ways. Like, I think consumers are just assume things are insecure and are maybe a little disillusioned or unfazed by that right now. People in the security community and in tech community obviously understand it's a huge threat and it's actually going to potentially become an even bigger threat.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:27:59) IoT security is extremely important and we're at this really important horizon right now with IoT devices where IoT devices being resource constrained, being pushed through, pushed out the door, random devices that never were connected before being engineered by teams that maybe don't have much experience connecting devices are now connecting them and shipping them out the door. We're running into this situation where we're going to have pretty much everything connected around us and a lot of that is not going to be secure, whether it's because of just a lack of security knowledge or know-how among engineers or old ways of thinking like, oh, I'll firewall my network and that should be enough. Oh, but wait, now I have a new attack vector behind my firewall due to my smart camera or smart smoke detector or what have you. So whether it's just due to the attack scenarios changing or engineers having a lack of security knowledge or both, we've got a major, major problem that is potentially coming up.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:29:24) Also a major opportunity if people can figure out a great solution for that. Tech companies are going to need to be, you know, taking this extremely seriously, especially as IoT gets closer and closer to human life. You know, with things like connected cars, medical devices, et cetera. I mean, privacy is a bad enough threat, but human life is going to increasingly be becoming a threat. So tech companies really need to buckle down their IoT devices, and we're probably going to see, you know, a lot of that will be driven by regulation and even government regulations and stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) So where's the spot to inject that? Would it be to convince the—like you said, regulations one, regulation, like, encrypting chips? I'm kind of stepping a little bit outside of my experience level. But, like, I was thinking to myself, all right. Well, there's—you know, I program in Rails a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) And you do—you obviously have programming experience. So you see the frameworks, what they'll do is when people get comfortable, they'll be lazy. So what will happen is that people developing the lower level technologies, lower in the stack, they'll start adding security features down there so that the people up top who aren't thinking about it are still secure themselves. That's the thought I wanted to get off my—off the top of my head. But my question is, where could that fit in and how could we use that concept over in the IoT? Would it be the chip manufacturers? Would it be people like you ensuring that your connections are encrypted? Like, where would that be a good fit?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:31:10) Yeah. I think there are a few different approaches. I mean, to directly answer your question, I think that multiple layers of security is almost necessary. So you've got, you know, maybe the network is firewalling and maybe even protecting individual devices from each other. We do a lot of that like, on our cellular network side, but you could imagine that even in the home, where maybe your Wi-Fi network doesn't let two devices talk to one another because they don't need to. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:39) Mm-hmm.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:31:39) So more firewalling and security depth down into the internal network is a great way to add a layer. I think, yeah, your connectivity chip manufacturers can be a layer of defense. Secure boot and other secure execution environment approaches can be another layer. So I think that overall, in general, we need a multifaceted, multilayer approach because you've got to account for what happens if one of the layers either gets compromised, has a zero-day vulnerability, or just wasn't done right. However, taking like, a big step back from all of that, there's another problem, and that is kind of what you're describing with—well, if everyone gets lazy, lazy security can be very, very ineffective.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:32:32) It can be even destructive to the overall security policy at any one of those layers even. So I think that we need to see almost better communication between the layers. And whether this is a technological communication, like it's technology talking with other technology and they're working in unison to achieve the same mission, or if it's people, like, through regulation and attestation, like, this thing does exactly this, and we promise that, and here's our certifications to back that up. I think either way, there needs to be almost like a cooperation between layers. Because if one layer doesn't really understand the threat model, they can unintentionally undermine it.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:33:18) You know, they can do one thing that can make them the weakest link and undermine the overall application. So I think that there's some sort of a communication aspect to it between the different multiple layers that is going to be really important. And that's actually something that's not solved right now. So that's kind of an open problem. We need to figure out how to—whether it's people managing the technology, like I said, with regulations, for example, or the technology helping to manage the technology, we have to kind of get the state of that to catch up, I think, to be able to then evolve fast enough along with the new threat models that are emerging.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:04) Yeah. I was reading this Xbox attack. I think it was in Wired magazine. I don't know if you heard about that, but they actually used like, one of the maintenance ports on one of the chipsets to actually attack the whole—act infiltrate the network.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:34:19) No, and that's a perfect example. I was lacking a specific example. That's a great one of what I mean by the different layers. If you don't have this cooperation and understanding between the different layers, you can have one component that will pretty much undermine the security on a network or on a system.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:34:39) And case in point, if you have debug interfaces that are unprotected because somebody either overlooked it or didn't realize its importance or how it affects the security of the rest of the system, then you've introduced an attack vector that can undermine the system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) Because they may be thinking, "Well, all you can do is just read this. All you can do is just watch this information, or you can only get in these areas." But if they don't have a full—and they're not expected to have a full and complete understanding of the entire system as a whole—but when you don't, you realize, "Oh, when you have this... what did you call it? Debug interface. You have access to this one thing, and with that one thing, you have unfettered access to the kingdom."

(Pat Wilbur at 00:35:25) Yeah, it's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) So where is the future of IoT? Where do you see IoT in ten years? And I'm going to make investment decisions based off this advice, so...

(Pat Wilbur at 00:35:37) Where do I see IoT in ten years? Well, ten years from now, I think we won't see IoT. And what I mean by that is...

(Pat Wilbur at 00:35:47) What I mean by that is, I think right now IoT is kind of like a feature or an enhancement. At some point, I think in the next few years—within ten years easily—it's going to become so ubiquitous that most of the IoT around us, most of the things... really, more that the environment is connected. It's not just individual things. So what I mean by that is, you know, your phone has a Wi-Fi radio and a Bluetooth BLE NFC radio onboard in addition to a cellular radio. As you walk down the street ten years from now, you're going to have devices that recognize unique serial numbers and identifiers on your devices and basically are like a form of beacon technology. And those beacons are going to outnumber the devices that are interacting directly with you. So I think that ten years from now, it's going to be more the environments are effectively smarter because these non-directly human-facing devices are going to be connected.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) Yeah, reminds me of the stingrays.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:37:06) Yeah, that's a whole other topic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:10) Sorry. I've got a wide array of being a geek, from physics to technology. The whole spectrum. I kind of play around with everything just to... I don't know, because it's fun. You know why? Because we're makers. We like to play around and see what's going on. Everything's kind of technology. It's like, "What can I make this device do?" As long as we're doing good stuff with that. Hey, so real quick, I'm curious. Your community looks awesome on Hologram. You've got really engaged people, and they're all talking about building stuff. I really enjoy that community. It looks really slick too. Is that built off of, what was it like, the Disrupt project? Or what starts with a D? Discourse?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:37:50) Discourse. Yeah. So we built that...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) Is that working pretty well?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:37:54) Yeah. We built that page off of Discourse, and yeah, it's not bad. Discourse isn't a perfect Q&A site, if you will, but it's kind of a mix between Q&A and forum, and it's working pretty well. And then we have a lot of active community management. So we have people who focus the majority of their time on interacting with people on the community, helping to support them, helping them to support each other, et cetera. But as a tool, Discourse is pretty good. It's not a set-it-and-forget-it thing, though. You need to be actively contributing to community building. There isn't a technological solution that, you know, you launch it and the community doesn't just build itself, even though that's kind of everyone's dream, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:49) Yeah. People just—it's like when Snow White sings, people just come out of the woods and start helping and building.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:38:54) Right. Yeah. It's kind of like open source software. The dream of open source is, "Oh, if I make this open source, then other people are going to do all my work for me." Well, it doesn't exactly happen that way usually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:05) Now you've got a lot of new work now.

(Pat Wilbur at 00:39:07) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) Yeah, to maintaining the project. And I see that message. I actually saw it this weekend. I was doing some Guard to auto-run some of my tests, and I saw, like, one of its plugins, or like three of its plugins. Different people are like, "Whoever wants to take over the project, let me know." So, yep. Awesome. Well, man, thank you for coming and hanging out. If people want to find out more about you, where do you hang out more? Twitter? You said you go on Twitter a little bit, or LinkedIn?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:39:36) I'm definitely more of a LinkedIn user as of late, even though it's kind of, you know, a more closed platform in some ways. Since everybody's on it, it doesn't end up mattering that much. You definitely can connect to me on Twitter, but you're not going to see many updates from me either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:52) Nice. Alright, so LinkedIn it is. And then you can just search Pat, P-A-T, Wilbur, W-I-L-B-U-R?

(Pat Wilbur at 00:40:05) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:05) Awesome. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.