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Transcript

Fees for Cybersecurity Speaking Engagements · CYBR.Signal

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: And hello everybody.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Cyber Sunday.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you're doing well.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Want to talk about a post on LinkedIn, and I've linked to it below because I don't I don't want anybody thinking that I'm just going to post something and not link to this person's uh this person's post.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: But this person said, the CISO that you should never take a speaking gig in cybersecurity unless you're given a fee.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I what he meant specifically, I think, was if you're invited to speak, you should not do that without asking for a fee because your time is valuable.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I get where he's coming from to a degree.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I think some of the comments in his post hit the nail on the head where you should really think about what you're saying there and what you're doing, depending on the speaking engagement, depending on what kind of organization is running it, that kind of thing.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So let me explain what I mean.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of us it came up in the, and I don't know this guy's background that well just from LinkedIn.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I really I don't know him personally, so this is not me trying to slam him necessarily.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: What I mean, my initial reaction to it, I just say, was that it was an arrogant post.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's just coming from the heart.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Again, not slamming, that's just how it struck me initially.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think there is some merit to his opinion, again, depending on the type of engagement, type of security conference or security, whatever it is.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I mean by that is if you came up in the cybersecurity community, like the from the B sides, all of the people who put B sides together and who do local conferences, I am one of those individuals that does HusekCon here, obviously.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can't tell by my shirt.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, those types of conferences are community conferences, and you need to be able to give back to them without expecting them to pay you something.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I even say that for Black Hat, RSA, a lot of the very large cybersecurity conferences, those still give back to the community because there's a lot of community people that go to those conferences.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's a ton of people that go to those conferences.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: If you're expecting a fee for all of those things, then you really basically what you're gonna do is severely hurt the cybersecurity community if everybody starts asking for a fee for those.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, and it's if you get, I think most people realize if you like submit with a call for papers and are accepted that way, that that's gonna be you're not gonna get a fee for that.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I do with USECCon every year, I invite several speakers to come speak.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we do pay some honorariums to our keynotes and that kind of thing, just full it full transparency.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't do that for any of our invited speakers or anybody who's a outside of the keynotes or anybody who's a call uh submits on the call for papers and gets accepted, because we see that as giving back to the community.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is not one of those, hey, come speak here to get exposure type of thing.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's not what that is.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's helping back, helping the community, helping give back to the community.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the initial post struck me as arrogant when I looked at it just from that perspective.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: But when you look at it from the other perspective of some of these events, and it's one of the reasons I created USECCOM because some of these events really, really bother me, is a lot of these events were are strictly like big commercials.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they want a few uh leadership leaders in the cybersecurity community to come out and give their conference, their event some semblance of um, I guess we've got real people here, right?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's we're we're not just this organization that's asking for a bunch of people to come pay to come into the conference and that kind of thing.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: But that's really what they what they are.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: So what they are is they're just getting they what they do is they get a majority of speakers from vendors to come out and speak, and all they do is give commercials.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't have a problem with vendors coming out and speaking at conferences.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of them do, as long as they give legitimate talks.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, it I guess I've I've talked a lot, I've blathered on a lot here, and I'm I'm kind of hitting my time limit that I leave these Cyber Sundays at.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I I'm gonna link to it.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just tell me what you think.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I really had an issue with him saying just across the board, you should speak.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: You should ask for a fee if you're invited to speak.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Given the type of event, I think you can say yes or no to that.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can't give it a blanket yes.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to be able to give back to the community.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not giving back to the community, then you're failing.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're always asking for a fee, you're not giving back to the community.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be able to kind of level the balance that out a little bit.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, let me know what you think.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to you next time.