Bugcrowd founder Casey Ellis joins me to dig into what AI is actually doing to bug bounties, vulnerability discovery, and open source security. We get into his "slopdemic" framing, the curl bug bounty saga, VDP readiness, the pentest market correction, and where security research policy heads next.

Casey Ellis is the founder of Bugcrowd, co-founder of disclose.io, and a board member of the Security Research Legal Defense Fund. These days he advises and invests through Tall Poppy Group and works at the intersection of security, AI, and policy. His argument is that the vulnpocalypse was already here, and AI has made the cost of both finding and reporting vulnerabilities collapse at the same time.

In this episode:

• Casey's path from building Bugcrowd to advising, investing, and policy work
• Why more practitioners need to get involved in policy, and why law is just code
• The slopdemic vs. the vulnpocalypse, and what actually changed in submissions
• AI lowering the bar for a broader, less predictable pool of threat actors
• Daniel Stenberg, curl, and maintainers below the security poverty line
• The lightning rod vs. rockets distinction between VDPs and bug bounties
• The pentest market correction underway from AI pricing pressure
• Collapsing OODA loops, hack-back, CFAA reform, SRLDF, and disclose.io

Chapters:

0:00 Intro and Casey's background
2:56 Why practitioners belong in policy
6:22 The slopdemic vs. the vulnpocalypse
9:40 AI lowering the bar for threat actors
11:47 Open source, curl, and the security poverty line
15:37 VDP vs. bug bounty readiness
19:20 The pentest market correction
24:20 What breaks first in vulnerability management
27:20 Hack-back and non-cooperative defense
28:43 A near-term playbook for security leaders
31:40 CFAA, SRLDF, and disclose.io

Connect with Casey:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseyjohnellis
Blog: https://cje.io
disclose.io: https://disclose.io
Bugcrowd: https://www.bugcrowd.com

Resilient Cyber: https://www.resilientcyber.io
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Jon Sakoda of Decibel joins me to break down AI's impact on cybersecurity startups, venture funding, and why endpoint is the Super Bowl of cyber.

Jon is the Founding Partner at Decibel, an early-stage firm backing technical founders in security and infrastructure. He started his career founding IMlogic, an IM security company acquired by Symantec, then spent over a decade at NEA working with companies like Cloudflare, MongoDB, and HackerOne before launching Decibel. We got into why he thinks AI is only magical if you have a magic power, why Decibel led a $100M seed into Ent, and where the firm is placing its next bets.

In this episode:

• Why Decibel operates like the Navy SEALs next to the big platform funds
• The founder community model and finding the early believers among CISOs
• What separates the founders who finish now that AI lets everyone start
• Ent's $100M seed and the self-driving moment for endpoint security
• Telling genuinely AI-native companies apart from AI washing
• AI eating venture capital and why cyber's best years are ahead
• Open models, frontier labs, and why the cat is out of the bag
• The agentic SOC, Dropzone AI, and driver assistance vs. self-driving
• Startup consolidation cycles and being an N of one
• How buyers and job seekers should evaluate early-stage vendors
• Decibel's next bets, from novel AI models to resilience and cyber insurance

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:32 Jon's background and founding Decibel
2:25 Big platform funds vs. specialized firms
3:56 Founders helping founders and early believers
6:22 Scaling beyond the early adopters
7:40 Who finishes the marathon in the AI era
10:19 Founders from outside cyber
12:21 Ent's $100M seed and the endpoint bet
14:53 AI-native vs. AI washing
17:04 AI is eating venture capital
18:55 Open models vs. frontier labs
22:41 The agentic SOC and Dropzone AI
26:03 Consolidation and the startup cycle
29:22 How buyers should evaluate young vendors
31:43 Decibel's next bets and cyber resilience
34:11 Game Day at Black Hat

Connect with Jon:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonsakoda/
Decibel: https://www.decibel.vc

Subscribe for more conversations with security practitioners and leaders, and find my writing at https://www.resilientcyber.io

In this episode I sit down with Ed Sim, founder and managing partner of Boldstart Ventures, to dig into where AI security, agentic infrastructure, and the venture market are actually heading.

Ed has been an inception-stage investor for nearly 30 years and has run Boldstart since 2010, backing hardcore technology companies across AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and physical AI. He was the first investor in Protect AI, which sold to Palo Alto Networks in a reported ~$700M exit roughly a year before ChatGPT launched. He is also early in companies like Keycard, Surf AI, and June. About a third of Boldstart's investments are in cyber, so Ed sees this market from the founder and investor side in a way most security conversations do not.

We get into why the era of building raw intelligence is giving way to an era of controlling it, what that means for on-prem models and private evals, and why Ed thinks nearly everything in security is going to get rebuilt from scratch.

In this episode:

- Why a day-one partnership looks different now that anyone can vibe code an MVP
- The Protect AI acquisition and what the first exit in AI security signaled to the market
- Competing as an inception fund against mega-funds writing giant seed rounds
- What founders should actually look for in a venture partner beyond the check
- The shift from building intelligence to controlling it, including routing, post-training, and on-prem deployment
- Why enterprise data, workflows, and private evals are becoming the crown jewels
- Vulnerability chaining, attack path reasoning, and how tools like Mythos are reshaping the security budget conversation
- Agentic identity and why Keycard treats agents as short-lived problem solvers rather than digital twins
- The Surf AI thesis on automated security hygiene and tying every asset back to an owner
- The real bottleneck slowing agent adoption in the enterprise

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:35 Ed's background and inception investing
1:57 Day-one partnerships in the vibe-coding era
3:53 The Protect AI exit to Palo Alto
6:14 Competing as an inception fund against mega-funds
9:17 What founders should look for in a VC partner
11:48 From building intelligence to controlling it
15:52 Boldstart's domain-specific model portfolio
16:16 Private evals, context, and memory as crown jewels
17:18 Mythos, vulnerability chaining, and attack path reasoning
20:59 How much access should you give the model
22:07 On-prem context and the autonomous workforce
24:49 Agentic identity and Keycard
28:11 Building brand and community with Insecure Agents
31:30 The Surf AI thesis and automated security hygiene
34:13 The real bottleneck to agent adoption
37:09 The easy button, Palantir, and a multi-model world
38:24 Two types of people in this new era

Connect with Ed:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edsim/
Boldstart Ventures: https://boldstart.vc
Ed's newsletter, What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC: https://www.whatshotit.vc

More from Resilient Cyber:
Substack: https://www.resilientcyber.io
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