I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

What sort of specialties do you have in mind?

But I am going to ask all of you to tread carefully when taking advice from well-intentioned experts. Over a period of 9 or so years, Patrick went from expressing opinions about a) why desktop software is still viable b) why web based is a better option than desktop because desktop causes too many pains c) why doing a SaaS model is better than the one time web based software (web version of BCC) d) why it may not be worth the stress of (some stressful event associated with clients in medical industry) for a SaaS which is generating less than $2000 MRR e) why a business like StarFighter is better because you feel like waking up and doing it for 5+ years in a row and f) eventually there will be a good reason for the decision to leave/stop Starfighter. Amongst these opinions, there would be two kinds of takeaway messages - the ones which are true independent of the specific time period (don't piss off your customer) vs the ones which are more subjective and epoch specific - e.g. Patrick's own admission of benefiting from AdSense (via the Content Network or some such thing) for BCC, which was probably not true by the time it was expressed publicly and is almost certainly not true today.

There is almost positively going to be a fair amount of time lag before these ideas germinate in the experts' head and they slowly turn into action in their lives, and by the time they are ready to write about it, sometimes they are close to the winding down phase of said idea. For the people who are keen to "follow suit", as they say, it is very hard to know if it is a good idea to invest the next 3-5 years of your lives trying to adopt the same idea.

This is all fine and obvious, you say. My concern has to do with the "other side" of the picture. When people were lavishing praise on the SaaS model about 3-4 years ago, I suppose I wasn't the only one who wondered "Wait a minute. What about the fact that a SaaS business takes up your mind space 24 x 7 x 365? Isn't that a cost most of us don't wish to pay?" And after a while, Patrick mentions in a MicroConf talk about doing an eBook or WP plugin first before embarking on a SaaS - all great advice. Just wish more people consider the balancing forces and always ask themselves whether they are getting the full picture.

I ran 0x41414141.com [1] for about 4 years. It was a set of CTF-style challenges of increasing difficulty with submissions via "secret" email addresses, a sendmail autoresponder and me - operating under the pseudo cavalier@0x41414141. It's singular goal was recruiting.

At the time, I was working with a totally badass team in a firm with a decidedly not-sexy brand for us security-types. We were hiring as fast as we could and _always_ had positions open. When we got someone good into the pipeline, we generally had no problem hiring them - the team and the work made that easy - but our candidate funnel was just too damn small. We had exhausted our referral pool, we were bringing on as many fresh grads as we could train, but it wasn't enough to keep up. We needed to broaden the funnel. Enter 0x41414141.com.

It was completely and totally unsupported, unrecognized and unreported through the official corporate recruiting channels. It was me, on my own time and my own dime with the quiet support of a few other guys in the shop. It had a singular purpose: to meet like-minded hackers and see if there was any chance they'd be interested in joining our merry little band of hackers.

Within the first year, I established the equivalent of a "repeatable sales process." There's the natural stages of the challenges themselves, but then the more delicate stages of transition:

(1) from the impersonal interaction with the service to the personal email exchange with cav,

(2) ...to a serious discussion about a new job

(3) ...to an IRL phone conversation

(4) ...to an open and honest talk about who we were, what we're doing and next steps

(5) ...to getting introduced to an actual corporate recruiter

Of course, like any "repeatable sales process" each stage is not only the continued progression but also qualification. The funnel was disappointingly ruthless, and that was just to get an intro to the recruiter. In any given year, I had:

(1) thousands of folks start challenges,

(2) several hundred make notable progress,

(3) traded personal email with dozens,

(4) got serious with 10s,

(5) interviewed a few,

(6) hired a couple

In the end, the results just didn't justify the effort.

To be clear - I loved running 0x41414141.com. I met a lot of great hackers and even hired a few. Many are HN'ers. (hi guys!) Many of the "security community rockstars" stumbled across the site and ran through the challenges as a fun exercise on a Sunday afternoon. I also watched - and coached - many clear newbs through the process, and was impressed with their grit, creativity and determination. I even hired a couple complete newbs, including a female, recent PoliSci grad working as a nanny who turned out to be an OUTSTANDING reverse engineer, when given the right support and environment to grow. She single-handedly kept my enthusiasm for running 0x41414141.com up for at least two years, even when the resulting hiring numbers made it clear it wasn't worth it.

I was really, really, really hoping Starfighter could "level up" the initial volume into that funnel, maintain (or improve!) the rough filtering percentages and have the resulting "hired" volume be higher and turn CTF recruiting into a sustainable business model. I'm disappointed it didn't work.

P.S. - this is the first time I've associated my real self with 0x41414141.com and the cavalier alter-ego. Congrats HN, you just got the scoop for this tiny little corner of history. While we're here...

  Hello Internet, this is cavalier.  If we connected
  via that moniker, please reach out and connect
  with my _real_ one. deets in my profile.  

I am still totally sold on challenges and hiring! That's still what I'm doing! We're just changing the business model.