And so the first thing we said to ourselves is, aha, we gotta solve the

architecture problem. The other thing we said

was, wait a second, there is this looming elephant in the room. The

800-maybe-800 pound gorilla in the room. And that's the emergence of

quantum computing. Quantum computing doesn't just change

security, it breaks it. Let's talk about what comes next.

Welcome to Impact Quantum. The universe dances its

snug as a rock. Quantum pot shad. Turn

it up fast. Can it, Frank. Blowing my mind at last.

Hello and welcome back to Impact Quantum, the podcast. We explore the emerging industry

and field of quantum computing where you don't need to have

a PhD or study particle physics. You just need to be curious.

And with me is the most quantum curious person I know, Candace Gooley. How's it

going, Candace? It's great. Thank you so much, Frank. I'm really excited

about today. We're going to be speaking with Adam

Firestone, who is the CEO of and co

founder of six Arrow. He's also

called, calls himself Quantum Secure Innovator.

I have lots of questions. It's very exciting. Yeah, I'm very

interested. So. So welcome to the show, Adam. How's it going? Thanks.

I am glad to be here. It's going great. I can't complain. I mean, I

could complain, but nobody would listen. So that is the

true. That is a true statement of wisdom. It doesn't matter. No one would care.

No one will listen. No one would care. So tell

us about. And it's pronounced six, zero, six

arrow. Okay. I wasn't sure if you're going for

like a Cicero type thing or it. Is really

pronounced six character URL that was available without a

surcharge. I like it. Which people don't realize. The struggle

is very real. Right, Candace? Absolutely. No, it's true.

It's really true. So that's going to register a domain name.

And it was like it was available, but it was also the surcharge was like.

Was it $2,000? Yes. It was insane. Right?

Well, that's cool. I'm guessing that the license

plate is. Probably available too, but probably I haven't looked into

that yet. So I'm curious

about this. How do you participate in like

quantum security? Like what? Or quantum

safety? Like what does that look. So maybe I'll take a step back and give

a general. The way we see the world.

I think the best way to start is to say that, look, we solve a

problem and we're not. You know, I like

the word quantum is cool. It gets People's attention, We like that a lot. But

at the end of the day, we are solving a business problem. And the business

problem we solve is what we think the most fundamental business activity

is. And that's the ability to move information from outside the organization,

into the organization and from into the organization, inside the organization,

outside the organization. We have called

this very creatively into, out, out to, in. And what happens is

this. Unless you are the person who makes their

living by making decorative wrought iron gates with a map torch in your backyard

out of leaf springs, you steal from wrecked trucks in the

middle of the night, you get paid in cash, and you advertise by

word of mouth. This applies to you, right? So everything in the world,

what happens is somebody or something sends you something that

is valuable to them and they send it to you because you have some level

of unique expertise. You take that expertise, you apply it to their problem,

you create a value add product and then you push it out.

And in that set of transactions, we have two hops across

organizational boundaries, and that's great,

and that's fine. And those hops

presuppose that you can move that information in a secure manner.

In a secure manner, meaning that only the right people see it,

that the information isn't changed by someone

without authorization along the way, and that you can rely

on it when you get it to work with it.

And so, to give you an example, you have

a great new idea and you put it together in an invention disclosure statement,

and you send this to your patent lawyer, and you send it to your patent

lawyer somehow. So it leaves your domain, goes to your patent lawyer's domain,

your patent lawyer does magic to it and creates a patent out of it and

then pushes that out again to the Patent and Trademark Office and a copy back

to you. So we're making cops all over the place through the wild, wild west

of the open Internet. And we have assumed to

date that there are many ways we do that, right? We assume we can use

MFT Managed File transfer. We assume we can use electronic file sync and

share tools. We assume we can use shared portals or

secure portals, like the kind you might use to send your stuff to your

accountant for your taxes, and that all these

magically will keep things secure. Except we've got a whole lot of evidence over the

last, I don't know, 40 years to include some really high

profile cases recently that none of this actually is secure,

right? Things are constantly getting breached. Not only are things constantly getting

breached, credentials are being stolen, you know,

right and left in the in the millions. And part of that, that's

what we. Know about target ceasefire. Way worse.

Well, let's assume it's all happening by a

factor of 10. The mechanics of the problem are still the same

and there's two sets of mechanics, so. So bear with me. I promise I'll get

done with this soon. No, no, no. This is fascinating. Along for

the hall, man. I got my rook sick on too. So

mechanics number one are

maybe the architecture that we rely on

for the Internet client server is

not securable. It's robust, it'll

get the information there. It is ubiquitous, it is

relatively inexpensive. But maybe it's not securable

and maybe it's not securable on a number of bases. Maybe it creates

one big target, right? Whatever server that is, maybe it, it relies

on humans who can be suborned

to administer it. And there's an entire class of attacks against the

humans that have nothing to do with technology.

Maybe it makes things so difficult when we try to secure the insecurable

that the people who are charged with doing their jobs get so

frustrated at five o' clock on Friday night when they have to get this, whatever

this is out the door to the right people on the other side that they're

using their personal Gmail accounts. We could go on and on about, about the

issues. And so the first thing we said to ourselves is aha,

we gotta solve the architecture problem. The

other thing we said was wait a second, there is this looming elephant in the

room, the 800-perhaps-800 pound gorilla in the room. And that's the

emergence of quantum computing. Now quantum computing has many,

many, many, many promises, right? I mean we could actually might have whatever

weather forecasts that are accurate. We ability to do

really neat things in healthcare like customized

medication schedules, early indications

and treatments for cancer, all sorts of great things.

Optimizing delivery schedules and resource usage. Quantum

computing can do a tremendous amount for us. And the reason it can do that

is because quantum computing more or less to simplify

it down and probably oversimplify it, so bear with me, is

it's incredibly massively parallel. It affects a

massive parallelization of computing. And the way I describe it to folks

is do you remember doing mazes as a kid? You'd have a book of mazes

and you'd run your pen down. You guys probably did it in pen. I was

never that good. I did it in pencil. But you'd run your pencil down from

the beginning and if that didn't work, you'd start again. And you start again and

you did this surreally. Imagine being able to do all of that

at the same time. All possible solutions to find the right

one. That's the promise of quantum computing.

Unfortunately, that runs smack into the

technology that underpins the Internet today. And that technology is

classical asymmetric cryptography. It's a lot of words, but.

Or a lot of syllables. Anyway, so classical asymmetric

crypto is things like rsa. It's things like elliptical curve. It is

the thing that allows that a lock icon on your

browser to appear because there's a discussion back and forth

between your browser and the server. It's the thing that allows your debit

card and credit card to be secured to you. It's the thing that allows your

keyless remote entry to your car to work. It is

ubiquitous. It is everywhere. And everything we do in the

connected world relies on it. Literally everything.

This technology in turn, relies on something called trapdoor

functions. Trapdoor functions are a type of math where it's really easy to calculate

the output output, but really, really hard. Think 10,000

to 100,000 years. Hard to figure out what the original inputs were

without. Without knowing what they were to begin with. And those form our

keys. And great, okay. Unfortunately,

quantum computing solves those in an efficient manner. Now,

efficient maybe an hour, maybe a day, we don't know. But it certainly isn't

100,000 years or 10,000 years. And so the security and

integrity of everything we expect and rely upon in the Internet is

at risk. And we said, aha, opportunity, great.

And so we looked around and one of the first thing we

noticed was that there are new post, relatively new

post quantum algorithms that have been standardized, right? So nist has

standardized ML chem, which is FIPS 203. They've

standardized MLDSA, which is FIPS 204,

and SLHDSA latitude digital signature

algorithms, which is FIPS 205. And there's another one in the wings called

HQC. HQC should be standardized sometime in

2017. ISO is working on a couple of algorithms in terms of

standardization. One is classic Macaulays, one is Frodo

Camp. Okay, great. But then we

started to look a little more deeply at this and we

realized that if you solve the algorithm problem and

only the algorithm problem, you haven't solved the quantum problem.

Why is that? So? The reality is, right now,

we're on three different computers. One of them may be a Mac,

one of them may be a PC, one of them may be something else. And

natively, those devices speak different languages.

Fortunately for the Internet, and for all of us, we have universal translators that

allow us to talk together. I'm kind of a sci fi geek, so

I apologize for the reference. You're in good company.

Those universal translators are things called Internet protocols.

And the reason why Internet protocols are so powerful is

because they're standardized and widely adopted. So for example,

when you see the little lock icon in your browser, your browser doesn't

know who it's talking to. Your browser doesn't know the server,

but it knows how to speak TLS and it knows how to negotiate a

TLS session with the server. And because TLS

is standardized, TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 is TLS's,

TLS's TLS and we're good to go. That's

great. Except the post quantum

Internet security protocols don't exist,

right? Not only do they not exist,

standards time is kind of like somewhere between normal people time

and geologic time, right? It took us 10 years to go

from TLS 1.2 to 1.3. And that's when everyone was

pulling in the same direction. We now have a

situation where there is a looming threat, right? Quantum computers, our latest and

Greatest guess is 2028 to 2030. Sometime in there they're going

to cryptographically relevant quantum computers are going to appear.

And we have a standards body, the ietf,

who's doing this internally. And

there are a number of things they are arguing internally about.

People far smarter than me, like Dr. Daniel Bernstein have written about

this. What that does is it applies friction.

Friction means we don't get standardization

until a later date. If we don't get standardization

until a later date, proliferation and broad adoption are also

similarly delayed. So how the heck are we going to talk to each other in

a secure way? And again, we looked at this and said that's a problem.

But the flip side of the problem is opportunity, right? So

we built two things. Thing one is a

platform that allows us to extend to a whole bunch of stuff. I can talk

about that in a little bit if you're interested. The thing we built on top

of the platform, the narrow end of the wedge as we enter the market we're

a startup, is something called Portal 6. What Portal 6 does is it

allows organizations to conquer and and address

that out to in to out problem by addressing

not just the quantum problem in terms of algorithms, but the

quantum problem in terms of algorithms and a mechanism that obviates the

protocol problem and also the architectural problem at the

same time, by adopting a decentralized approach to

information Movement and networking. And so

that's who we are. It's what we do. We've been around about a year,

and yeah, we're about to enter the market, hopefully

with our first pilots sometime either later this month or next month.

Oh, interesting. Very fascinating

stuff here. What

would you say

has been your biggest challenge in terms of conveying your

message? Right. I liked your whole spiel. I liked your whole spiel. I

loved it. But that would have been one heck of an elevator ride.

It's really hard. And your point is really, really well

taken. And so the answer is here, read

on white paper. But people don't want to read. The elevator

pitch is. Look, you face three huge problems. Actually four if we

count credential leakage. You face four huge

problems. The world is telling you they've got one of them

solved. All four are fatal.

I'm glad we've solved one of them. But the other three are going to kill

you. We can help. And then now

you've got their attention. Right? Well, I use a first aid analogy. If you're

familiar with the acronym MARCH in first aid.

Massive bleeding, airway, respiratory, circulatory

and hypothermia or head injuries, right. Any of those

can be fatal. That's just the order you check the list in.

And, and so for our, from our perspective, if you are

not addressing all of it, right, architecture,

credential leakage, algorithms and

protocols, you're not addressing the problem, your patient's still going

to die. And we seem to be stuck in a do loop right

now inside the community where we are focused on only the algorithms,

right? And algorithms alone don't get you very

far. Algorithms have to be integrated, they have to be

employed, and they have to be put into, into protocols, you know, for

comfort. Organizations that do their own bespoke software, all of that

matters for the majority of organizations in the

world that use somebody else's software. You know,

think about your Microsoft 365 account, right? How many organizations just

use that as the basis for their software? And they're good to go.

For organizations that do that, we are in this position of

having to wait for vendors to fix all the problems.

And what we think we can do is provide a solution that will grow with

you, that is available immediately and will grow with the organization even as these

other solutions roll out.

Go ahead, Candice. She has something profound. She's going to say, yeah,

don't set me up like that. I'm just really kind of

interested. You know, everybody, I mean, everyone

needs this kind of Security in their system.

So how do you determine, you know, what

sectors you're trying to go after in what you know

and what kind of priority otter to have as opposed

to not, you know. Right, that's a great,

that's a great question. And it really is about a go to market

analysis. So right now we've got some really cool

stuff. So I'm going to walk right out into a Global

50 law firm, sit myself down in their IT department and they're

immediately going to fall over themselves trying to buy my stuff.

Probably not, because that's not how that works. Right.

So you take a page out of Startup101 and

Startup101 says, I'm going to get myself a set of pilot

customers that prove out the point. I'm going to look at two or three or

four sectors that really could use this. And if we think

about professional services, for example, right, Lawyers, what do lawyers do?

I give you what is the most important thing in the world to me so

you can do something important for me with your expertise, that is create something and

push it out. Well, if that sounds like out to in into out. How about

accountants? How about financial services? How about consultancies?

We can go down the list. There are a whole lot of those

organizations out there. And if we start with organizations that are

small, let's say, and small is interesting. So let me go into

that for a second. Let's say 10 people, maybe 100 people

max. One, we're getting legitimacy. Two, we are able

to, in real time to continually improve the product. And three,

there is a concept of internal and external seats in our product.

So you have a law firm, 20 lawyers, right. So you got

20 seats, but each lawyer has 100 clients.

So you need the ability to create these secure communications,

secure information exchanges, we call them sixes. Secure information

exchanges. You need the ability to create sixes with

at least some significant subset of that 20

times 100 of those 2,000 seats. And so by

starting small one, we gain legitimacy, we gain the ability to come back

to larger clients over time. And at the same time we are

exposed to many, many, many other people because the attorney or the,

or the accountant or the, or the financial analyst or whoever

is now working with some other group who sees

the tool and says, I would like some of that, please. And so

it's, it's a virtuous cycle that feeds back into itself and

continuously allows us to go after bigger and bigger organizations.

Interesting. This reminds me of the

conversation we had yesterday. Frank with the harvest now

decrypt later. Yeah,

that's a good thing. And then so, folks, I mean,

obviously I encourage listeners to go back and go back and watch that,

listen to that. But harvest now to later kind of defined

in a sentence is, I know that in a couple of years

I'm going to have, as a nation state, I'm going to have access to some

of the tools that will crack this existing encryption. I'm going to start hoarding data

now because storage is cheap. And honestly, if I'm a state actor,

money ain't. I will quote Jay Z, bling bling. Money ain't a thing. Right.

And so what's

Adam, does that, does the fear of harvest now

decrypt later, does that scare a lot of people as much

as it should? So not as much as it should, but

certainly more than it did when we started on this journey.

We had to really explain Quantum and the threats posed

by the ongoing attack. Right? The attack is happening. This

conversation is being, is being recorded. And that's great. Maybe they'll hit the

like button when they decrypt it and they read it.

But now all of a sudden, Quantum

is really starting to hit the news cycle and we're starting to get a

whole lot of interest and people are really starting to,

to twig to it. It takes less and less effort to explain where we're coming

from and why we're doing what we're doing as time goes by. And by the

way, that's part of the whole, the gestalt behind why we

think, for example, we're a great investment. Because there will come a time,

if you guys remember Y2K, I'm probably the only one old enough to

do that. Don't argue with me.

And if you remember the, the craziness, you

couldn't spend money fast enough in about

1998. Right. In about

2027, we're going to be in a position 2027,

2028, where organizations will not be able to spend

money fast enough to get anything called post Quantum.

And so we are, we'd like to think really far out ahead of that

wave. Yeah, I can

easily see that. Like, you know, you're starting to see

feature lists of, you know, this is post Quantum safe. Or, you

know, my concern is, you know,

the unlimited

funding led to excesses which ultimately added fuel to the fire of

the.com boom. And it's not hard to see the parallels

of the AI boom and that, that

fear kind of doing that and kind of like the aftermath, like, I don't know,

like that's the kind of thing, that's the sort of thing that also kind of

keeps me up at night. Right. Well, I like to think that we are

serious about our technology. We're also serious about the value we provide.

We're serious about our cryptography.

I am by training

and avocation a systems engineer. Right. I build stuff, it's what I do. I figure

out what, what the problems are, what the solutions are, deliver

those solutions to people who need them. And we don't

build fluff on top of that. We don't gold plate it

and we don't lie about what we're building. There are some

serious concerns that the cryptographic community has

about where we're going in terms of post quantum capabilities.

And those concerns are things we're aware of and we build in or

we will be building in mitigation

mechanisms so that no matter where it goes,

the, the products are able to deflect and

still support the user base. That's a

good way to put it. Like, and not, not saying like that you would take

advantage of it. But like I just wonder like, you know, let's, if we can't

learn from history, you know, as an industry.

Right. You know, George Santano. Right. I mean those who do not learn from history,

doomed to repeat it. There's a lot of people who are doomed to repeat it.

Yeah. Sabotru. So when you're, when you're working with businesses

who are now getting excited about Quantum because they're hearing about

it on the news and AI plus Quantum, what, what is the biggest

misconception that you come across

that they have about. I think there's, there's quantum can do. There's a couple of,

couple of places things intersect. So one of them, one of them

is, is the idea that it's all

solved because algorithms.

Another is really, what does this mean to me?

And the idea that anything you do, from

your mobile device to your laptop to your desktop,

talking internally to the server, talking to different parts of your organization

that may be distributed, any and all of that is

subject to harvest and therefore attack is something

people have a rough time wrapping their heads around. People have a rough time

wrapping their heads around the concept of all data. Right. I think, you know,

one of the things we have done historically in cybersecurity is we have

categorized and classified data as to. This is really important.

This is not so much important. The problem is given the

scale of data movement, it's really

hard to separate that out. You know, you have an employee who's Ordering

lunch on doordash. You have another employee who's moving some really

sensitive stuff. It's coming over the same wires, the same pipe.

How do I, how do I separate those out? Our philosophy

is you shouldn't be, you should be applying cryptography in a blank

way to protect your information so that it doesn't matter

what information it is, it's all protected. And that

reduces a level of, a burden level on, on, on defenders,

because you just assume everything is going to be protected

over the course of its life cycle.

So I think that's part of it. The other part of it is, what do

I do? People don't know where to start.

And so one of the design principles in

our first product is it's going to be boring.

It's going to look like stuff you've seen a million times that you

intuitively know how to use. And all the special stuff

is hidden. It's all under the hood. And as a result,

we don't create a daunting factor for either

employees or CIOs. It's a web based

product for a reason initially, right? I don't want

CIO Frank to come to me and say, wait, what, you want me to

move all my data? I have to buy three more servers, I have to

install software on everyone's machine? No, they'd have to go to a browser,

open a tab, and if you do that, all of a sudden, you've made

adoption really, really easy, relatively painless. And then

when you want to move into future iterations that might be a little

more invasive,

you've established trust with people, you've established a track record

as opposed to coming in and demanding that the world change just to accommodate

you. And I think that's, that's not a winning strategy.

No, it's a good way to put it.

That's a good way to put it. It's funny that you say boring, right? Make

it boring, right? Because that's true, right?

From the sales cycle point of view. You want to have the sizzle and

the amazement and all that, but realistically, enterprise software at its best is boring

because they don't want drama, you don't want surprises, right?

And you don't want to have to train your employees. You don't want a barrier

to entry. You want this to be, I mean, it's one of the things I

say is, hey, that's a really nifty iPhone you have. That's a really

nifty Android you have. How long was the user manual?

What user manual exactly? Right. And that's, that's the goal.

That's what you're trying to achieve. You're trying to achieve a seamless

and almost transparent, completely transparent

adoption and make it simple, painless, easy,

and to have it continually grow because

that level of simple and easy makes it the gotta have

application. Right. I mean, that makes sense.

What? Yeah, no, like

I actually just got a Kindle and this is the user

manual for it. It's got a color Kindle and this

is the user manual. Exactly. All the stuff they couldn't get away with

because it's all regulatory notices. Right. There is a manual,

apparently on the actual device, but.

No, that's true. Right, because let's say shipping cost, it says a lot. Right. Plus

the only thing worse than the manual, I mean then no

manual is an inaccurate manual. And the

problem is nobody reads the manual. Right. I mean, you know, I spent, I

spent a bunch of time in the army. Right. And RTFM was a, was a,

was a watchword. But the reality is nobody reads

anymore. So you've got to create something that's intuitive and easy to

adopt. So. Right. So let's go back because

now I'm all excited about what shaped you into

where you are today. I mean, you're a seven time patent

owner, you've written. You actually you

told me in the green room that you've just released another

book. Yep. Okay. On

tech, startup life and advice to give,

which is incredibly exciting. So why don't you walk

us back a little bit. To you, in university,

what were you focusing on and what kind of major path go

towards Quantum. Wow.

I was born a long time ago at a very young age.

So in university I, I was an ROTC cadet. I was one of three

ROTC cadets and I graduated.

And six days later I show up at Fort Knox to become an armor officer

and do all sorts of stuff. And through

that path and after I got out of the regular army, one of the things

I constantly noted was we were training to fight

in a way that would have been totally familiar

to Patton's 3rd Armored at Bastogne in

World War II. And I was wondering why this was. And then I got out

of the regular army, went to law school

and I practiced law for a while and I kept wondering,

why are we doing this stuff by hand? It wasn't at Quantum

yet. And so I got frustrated. Right. I mean,

getting frustrated as a lawyer is probably something common to many

lawyers. And I stopped doing that after a while and I

went and I moved down from New York to Northern Virginia.

And one day I walked into a job fair, a big defense

contractor and it was mobbed. I mean there's all sorts of people there, right?

And there was one table that was not mobbed, and that one table was

not mob because it didn't have a fancy display, it had a whiteboard with a

bunch of acronyms on it. So I walked over because I figured they looked lonely.

And I said, hey, my name's Adam Firestone. Here's my

resume. As you can tell from there, I'm not qualified for anything you have on

that board, but you want to hire me and this is why. And

they did. And so I spent almost 20 years at that company.

Last thing, I mean I clawed my way up and I taught myself and

got had the opportunity to take a lot of training work with a lot of

really smart people and an IR transformed

into a systems engineer. I had the opportunity to work and take some classes

at some really, really top notch organizations.

Wound up teaching systems engineering in the organization's

in house university before I left. And I guess the last

thing I did was I pretty much single handedly redesigned

the mission planning and command and control systems for a small little

system you might have heard of called Tomahawk.

But I got the security bug when I was, when I was there, right? Because

security was S.E.P. somebody else's problem. You built your

stuffs and then the information assurance people

would poke at your stuff and then probably let it onto their

network and that was it. And that sort of seemed disconnected and

disjointed to me. So I had the opportunity to go and

do some interesting middleware work, open source and

middleware, which is really cool, and do some really cool travel to South Asia, which

was also really cool. And in the process of doing

that, I really got a fantastic introduction to the idea of

integrated security. The idea that we can build it

in and build it right. In fact, I'm also the editor in

chief of, of United States Cybersecurity Magazine. And my, my

tagline is Build it Right America, because that's really where I, I

got that bug. And I said great, security is great. What security? I

know threat intelligence. So I went into threat intelligence, which by the way, spoiler alert

is neither. And, and I got

this, I got disillusioned and I said maybe security is,

is protecting the information with cryptography. I got my first patent when

I was working in threat intelligence that was in a multi level security system.

And then I moved into this pure play

cryptography world and second patent there post Quantum

symmetric cryptographic algorithm, which is kind of pointless because

AES is good. But, you know, it was another patent.

And I learned a whole lot about it, but I really learned that

you've got to put it together for people. You've got to hand

them something they can use on day one. Because at

the end of the day, nobody cares about your cryptography.

They just don't care about components. They care about the ability to do their jobs,

which was the right answer. And they care when

there's a leak or an issue. Right, right. But day to day

and convincing people to buy it. So then we go

and I said, what should I do next? And one of my co

founders, who is still one of my co founders, sat down and we said,

okay, the whole problem is we talked about that

architectural problem, we should do it this way.

And we created a company and we started to do it this way. And we

got acquired really early by a larger company,

cloud company. We built out a grand

solution that solved everything. And that was the worst thing you could

possibly do because, Frank, as you pointed out, it takes half an hour

to explain a grand solution

and you can't sell that. And then eventually there was this

realization on everyone's part that our focus on

decentralization was fundamentally at odds with a cloud

organization's focus. Right. I mean, it just doesn't work. Right.

So we left and we sat down and said, okay, so we learned a whole

lot about what not to do. Let's do that the right way.

And we were joined by a classmate of mine from university,

became our third co founder, and the rest is kind of history.

And so we put together Sixero and we have been fortunate to

work with some really, really good people. It's a small team right now, and

when we close this round, the team will grow, but not by a whole lot.

Really focused on being efficient, being lean, and putting product

out there as rapidly and efficiently as possible.

So the quantum thing happened over time.

Among other things that I have done or did do or am doing

is I taught at a couple of universities. So I taught cryptography and

systems engineering at Georgetown at the graduate level. I

taught at the George Mason University Business School and I

taught undergraduate at George Mason cybersecurity

engineering. For all of those areas,

quantum was an issue, and it was a looming issue that became

more and more imminent. And that's when I really got familiar with the,

the threat and I really got familiar with what are the solutions. And I was

part of the original, yay, we have algorithms. And then, you know, you took a

deeper dive into that and you said, wait a second, I'm a systems engineer. What

are my actual requirements? My actual requirements include the ability to

converse, the ability to move information in real time,

and holy smokes, this, this data in transit problem

doesn't go away with just the algorithms. And so

quantum. I'm interested in quantum computing. I write about it a lot in

my substack and. But I'm really interested in the ability

of the world to continue to be the world that we know

after the advent of quantum computing. It's really about

preserving our ability to innovate and work together and work

collaboratively as an economy, as a country, as a global.

As a global set of partners. That's a good

way to put it. I don't know if you. There's a YouTube channel called the

Y Files and

he has one on post Quantum, like the post the Q Day, I think is

what it's called. And normally he covers like crazy

conspiracy stuff. That's normally like kind of what he covers. But

like, you know, when he, when he did the one on what a post Quantum

kind of world would look like, it was kind of like, that was the one.

I'm like, yeah, I can't debunk anything in that. Right. I mean, he did

play up some things for, you know, dramatic effect. But aside from that, I mean,

everything else looked like it was pretty legit and pretty alarming.

Right. Like, so I highly recall. We'll put a link in the show notes. It's

a cool show anyway. There's like a talking goldfish. And it's funny.

It can be alarming. It can be. And it's

fascinating because there are so many people and so many players with so many

agendas. I mean, there's, there's like James

Bondi spy stuff as well. And, and there's

suborning of, or. Or accusations

of suborning of standards bodies. And, and why are we using

this instead of that? And this seems to be, you know,

somebody else's agenda. And, you know, okay,

those are real, right? Those are real concerns by really smart people.

And so you can do a number of things. You can throw up your hands

and say, voila, or you can push the I believe button. Just accept what

someone says because they're saying it. Or you can take, I think, the route we

took, which I like, well, I'm probio interested in. And

that was. We said, if this is true,

what do we need to be able to do to

mitigate that problem? There's a phrase that I

absolutely despise but has gained traction. That

is important. And that phrase is crypto agility. And you

may have heard that phrase, I get a stomachache every time I hear it. I

get a worse stomachache every time I say it. Not because

it isn't important, but because it sort of

glosses over the fact that we should have been building our systems,

all of them, in such a way that everything is

modular, that everything is replaceable, that everything is

maintainable, and. And the fact that we had to come up with this as an

industry, we had to come up with this marketing phrase, crypto

agility, which nobody knows what it means anyway,

bugs me. It's more popular cousin, which is also

about as same on the cringe level, is digital transformation.

See? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a visceral reaction when you hear that. It's like, ugh.

And every time I say it, I throw up in my mouth a little, you

know? But the core of the discussion for

us was when we build things,

we build things in a very, very careful way. The system is

extraordinarily carefully architected to allow

us to swap things in and swap things out. We are not

tied into any one technology to any one way of doing things.

We know what we want to accomplish, but the tools and the mechanisms

we accomplish that with, we can change as we need to change.

And so with respect to cryptography and all the spy

stories and the. And the clashing and the gnashing of teeth and. And all that.

And I mean, you remember the rock versus Disco wars? Yeah,

yeah, okay. That was nothing compared to the hybrid

versus PQC wars, right. That are going on

right now. And. And so our response is

we provide customers the ability to say,

hey, this matters to me. I want this

type of crypto or that type of crypto or this type of crypto. And so

it becomes something that we can manage to give them the

ability to manage for themselves. Because prescriptive never gets you very far because

you're going to make someone unhappy at some point.

That's true. Quantum

has a very long R and D Runway,

generally. So how do you balance your

visionary ambition with practical, near term

commercial value? There are things

people need to do. I need to be able to send

Candace my magnum opus, right. So she can read Still Scrappy,

which is the book that came out last week. And

how do I do that? And I need to have a conversation with you. How

do I do that? And I need to send you a text message or a

chat. How do I do that? The set of things people need

to do is finite. And if you think about the smartphone when it first came

out, it didn't enable you to do anything different.

It just let you do it in one place. The things you

needed to do, I need to take notes, I need to take pictures, I need

to call my friend, I need to send text messages. All of that

was just done in one convenient package. And so

if we look at the world as a set of I need to be able

to. How do I enable people to do

all those things based on the set of constraints that emerging technology

is placing on them? And so what you do is

you start with. Remember that narrow wedge I mentioned earlier? You

start with a narrow wedge, I'm going to allow you to move files from point

A to point B, period, full stop. Right? It's just a data in

transit solution. We're not a file system, so on and so forth. But

maybe in the future I'm going to add on voice and maybe in the future

I'm going to add on video. Maybe in the future I'm going to add on

tap chat and it's going to be all decentralized and it's going to be

a complete unified communications platform. And I build it out over time

based on levels of staffing,

levels of investment, levels of sales and so on and so forth. But you have

a roadmap and you adhere to that roadmap until the

market slaps you in the face, at which point you say, okay, I get the

picture. Let me pivot companies that can understand where the market

is today and what the pivot points are. And the indicators of the

pivot points are the companies that survive and thrive. Did that answer your question?

Way better than in my imagination. Really good

job, by the way. Thank you. Of answering said question.

So what else can I say? Tell me about this book. I think I still

scrappy, I think was in my Amazon recommendations feed.

I should be scrappy. Good on you, man. I don't know,

I remember seeing that title somewhere. So maybe it was from LinkedIn or whatever.

I consume a lot of content and

the upside is I appear really smart. The downside is I lose

kind of like the origin of it. Like, so I'll be like, I remember hearing

this somewhere and like I have a lot of those moments. And

there's actually an SAT word. Maybe we should have that as a, as a

feature for season four. Candace, The SAT word of the day. I love

SAT words. I love SAT words.

Cryptonisia, which means

you don't remember where you heard something or something like. I think that's what

it is. You remember something, but you don't remember where you learned it from.

Kryptonisia is when I try to forget about RC4. Anyway.

So tell us about the book. So there are two books, actually.

The origins are. Why

would it be it. I had been both involved in

the previous company, and there were a bunch of things I saw that

operationally that didn't make sense to me. And then I

was advising another company, and I liked

those guys. Oh, man, did I like. They were just good folks,

but they approached everything as if it was de novo, as it was brand new,

as if this had never happened before, ever.

And I, you know, you do your advisor thing and you say, hey, maybe you

could. Here's a way. And you know, you get ignored because it's never

happened before. And we have to figure this out from the beginning. And they

kept inducing friction into their processes as a result

of that. So I started to write a blog

anonymously. And the blog was just my way

of. It was cathartic. I was getting it all out of my

system. And at some point I looked back and I said, holy smokes, I got

a whole bunch of stuff here. And this stuff is actually pretty good.

And I put together a book called Scrappy but Hapless.

And I like Scrappy but Hapless. Really. I think it's a

really good book. It's not as disciplined as I would

have liked it to be because it evolved from a series of blog posts.

And the blog posts eventually matured to the point where each post

grew longer. I went from basically 1100 words or so per

post to 3 to 5000 words a post.

And of course, nobody's going to read that, right? I was posting

for me, it was anonymous. I had violated every rule

that Medium has about how you get readership.

And what I had realized was the evolution kind of happened on its

own. There are three parts to the posts I'm most happy with in that

book. And part one is a historical story.

It could be anything from the history of East Germany or something in

East Germany or something that happened in the ancient world. And

then there's a thread that connects it to modern tech companies and

how companies navigated the same sort of problem, because the problems don't

change. Who's navigating them changes. And then the third

part was a fictional vignette about a mythical startup

called Scrappy but Hapless, or sbh. And there's a

cast of characters. There's Mallory, the CEO. Carlos, one

of the lead engineers. Alex. Alex, another lead engineer.

Teresa, the chief commercial officer, Marie, the

cto. And what that has done is. It's two

things. One, it's the dessert, right? It's the reward for getting through the rest of

the chapter. But two, it really puts it in context for

people living in a startup universe about

each specific problem. And so the first book is

good. Like, it is not necessarily

important to read it in any particular order because all the chapters stand alone.

But I learned a lot. And by the time I figured it out and published

the first book, I had about half the material for the second book already

written. And so the second book really

refined that. And so still scrappy.

The subtitle is how the Threads of History Inform and Influence Tech

Startup Leadership. And it does the same thing. And

it really is a manual for doers. It's a.

You're not alone. You haven't done this has been done many, many times.

Learn from history. Learn from the ability of other people

to solve the problem, then pick that up and run with it. And of course,

then there's the scrappy but hapless stories, and they're fun and they're endearing,

and you get to like and really identify with the characters.

And I think on my radar at some

point is a scrappy but hapless novel about tech startup using

those characters. So they're. They're both on Amazon

and you know, hardcover, softcover, ebook, whatever.

And yeah, so. And it also,

you know, there's a day to day involved with being a CEO of a tech

company. Right. And. And so that day to day, in many cases, wound

up in the books in one. In one way or another.

Interesting. That's interesting. It seems like there's a lot of good information to, like, glean

from that book. I'm definitely gonna pick up a copy.

Cool. That's fantastic. So you've got to think that being. Being an

author and completing it, which is one of the. I work for a

tech book publisher for years, and I've been in publishing for

years, and the hardest thing in the world is to actually finish a

book. I will tell you, Candace. Oh, my gosh.

One of the things I realized through the whole journey was

how incredibly awesome

publishing has become. So publishing used to be the

world of gatekeepers, right? There might

be a million people writing things, and maybe 50 of them get a book out,

right? And when you get a book out, one, they change it. So it's not

you writing the book anymore. It's some editor or group of editors writing the book

and then it's on some schedule where you've had great grandkids

by the time the book comes out.

What Amazon has done with Kindle Direct publishing is

level the playing field. And it used to be that, you know, it all looked

like Sam's Dot stuff way back when. That was just yuck. Right? The

quality was meh. Not anymore. I mean,

oh my goodness. The ability to communicate,

the ability for everybody to get their message out there

has never been more available. And

I think it's fantastic. I think the ability of everyone to say

this is my world. Let me describe it for you. Not everyone's going to sit

down and write a book, but you can and you can then publish it

and it's virtually free. Yeah,

no, and I'm a big fan. Candice, how many books have we put

together this year? We did two last year. We did one or two.

Yes, we did one last year. Right, exactly. And

it's true, you have this information and you're compelled to get it

out there and to talk about it. It's very

exciting that it's true. We ourselves have used the

Amazon Direct to Kindle Publishing. But you're right, I mean,

I'm sorry Candice cut you off. No, no, go ahead. Too many monster energy drinks

today. The.

The gatekeepers. Right. Like you know and I know Candace worked for a big

publishing and if you're really curious, you can look her up on LinkedIn, see who

it was. But

those books, I've written one book for a big. Not

that company the candidates work for, but a different one. And I mean it

was a 13 month cycle and that was fast. Right.

And if you look at like writing a book about an

AI topic or security topic, I mean 13 months is an

eternity, right. Thirteen months ago,

from the AI space, deep seek wasn't a thing. Right.

Thirteen months ago, Willow was just about to be announced. Right. Like

I don't know how the publishing industry, at least traditional publishing industry

is going to keep up. But Kindle Direct, man, I mean it's just if

you want to get now you do have to do some sifting because you're right.

Like the quality is way better today than it used to be. But you do

have to do some sifting. But I tell you man, some of the best,

smartest people I know have books out there because they're free from

publisher input, which isn't always positive

and they're the time

to production is just phenomenal. Right.

You can finish a book On Tuesday and it can be published by Friday.

Yes. I mean it's, it's. Or Thursday. I mean, it's, it's

wild. Yeah, well, they always tell you like it could take five days, but they

always like trick you and like they do it in 48 hours. Yeah, I,

I wrote one of the chapters. I think it's in still scrappy. Is. Is really

about. It is. It's. It's about the importance of a personal platform for

founders of a startup. And so

book publishing is one of them. But platforms like Substack,

oh my goodness. Learning how to use LinkedIn,

absolutely critical. I write on a tech topic,

usually about a thousand words a day, and I publish. Published

it every morning at 6am on both LinkedIn and Substack.

And that has been really, really important and

effective about creating recognition and creating

a voice and trust within an overall community.

And again, we have never. The

ability to move information so that it creates a

personal platform that is influential and effective for a business has

never been better than it is today. And I can't

emphasize podcasts like this. I can't emphasize

how important it is for founders to take advantage of those things.

Yeah, well, we love hearing that.

You guys are doing a tremendous service. Right. For both a

founder like me and potential buyers and potential. I mean, what

it really does is it helps get the word out and it helps

unify the community in a way that you could not

do 10 years ago. No,

it's true. Like, I mean, and you look at like what, what

podcasting has done just in general. Right? You're

right. If I wanted a radio show. Right. There were a lot of gatekeepers.

Right. And

you would have to be beholden to sponsors. Right. Like, we love

sponsors. We are actively seeking sponsors as we record this. Just putting it out

there. But our production costs are so low.

Season 3 was not sponsored by anyone. Right.

I think up through season eight of Data Driven also. Well, we had one

sponsor, but it was largely. The production costs are so low. And

I think you're right. If anyone, it's really,

it's not so much the cost. Right. Because realistically, anyone who's a professional, an

IT professional is going to have a laptop. They're going to have post

pandemic, they're going to have a camera and a microphone. That's good enough.

Right. It's really

just time is really the only production cost. Candice and I have this discussion all

the time, like, let's do this, let's do this. And we try to figure out

the most time efficient way. Right. Because to do

something and the, the. Democratization

of information that things like that

enable is so valuable. I mean, I know that there's a

lot of about, about

who says what when on what social media platform, but at the end of the

day, I'm a firm believer in the idea that in the marketplace of ideas, the

best ideas will win out. And, and the ability to

contribute to that marketplace is, is not only valuable

again for founders and for, for purchasers and for people in the community,

but I think it's valuable to the nation as a whole. Yeah,

that's a good way to put it. Agreed. Agreed.

So where can everybody find out more about you

and what you're doing? So there's

the Sixera website and that's

www.63ro.com.

There is LinkedIn. So, you know, feel free to look me

up. First name, last name, Adam Firestone. Pretty easy to find.

And I think with those two entry points, we can

take you just about anywhere. If you join and you follow me on

LinkedIn or you connect with me on LinkedIn, the daily tech

stuff that I publish will come straight to your inbox or straight to your

feed. Cool. Awesome. Excellent.

And with that, we'll play the outro music. Excellent.

Quantum podcast, they're breaking the mold Science and sky beats

it's bold and it's gold.

The multiverse is skanking, skanking in time Black holes

are wailing in a horn line so fine From Planck scales to planets they're

connecting the dots Candace and Frank, they're the cosmic

hot shots.

Quantum podcast, turn it up fast Candace and Frank,

blowing my mind at last Quantum podcast, they're breaking

the mold Science has got beats it's bold

and it's gold.