Last week I attended my first RSA Conference in San Francisco representing Bright. I wanted to share my impressions and thoughts as a first-timer at the RSA craziness.
Let’s start with the bottom line:
- >2,000 leads collected
- >60 meetings attended
- >500 new LinkedIn followers
- 1,000 kites given away
- 2,000 stickers given to attendees
- >XYZ ounces of alcohol consumed
- <3 hours a night sleep
- Hundreds of new friends
- 0 CoronaVirus (so far…).
If you walked around San Francisco last week and didn’t see a NeuraLegion kite, you must have not actually been in San Francisco as they were everywhere!
The conference is a non-stop 24-hour event that starts on Monday and ends late Thursday evening. However, this is an understatement. Having a larger team from Bright represent at RSA this week, the team actually came to San Francisco on Saturday (a couple of days before the conference) so we could do some team building and PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE to make sure we take advantage of RSA.
The conference started in earnest on Monday and most of the day was spent in pre-scheduled meetings.
PRO TIP: Schedule as many meetings as possible ahead of time as this will be very valuable and help you focus.
The B-Sides conference was held in San Francisco in parallel to the RSA Conference. It was great to attend some of the sessions and catch up with Tanya Janca (@shehackspurple) to discuss DevSecOps and empowering developers to write more secure code.
After the opening reception on Monday it was time to start the evening festivities. There were many events, but my favorite was the ClearSky Ventures cocktail reception. Thank you to the Clearsky team for hosting us and all the great people we met.
Shoham & Me sneaking a picture with the team before the rest of the guys showed up.
In addition to the meetings and sessions this was the busiest day at the booth and our team had hundreds of discussions with people excited to discuss AppSec, DAST, DevSecOps and many other application security related issues.
We will skip the evening festivities, but I’ll add 2 pro tips here.
PRO TIP 2: Make sure you remember that you have a 7AM meeting Wednesday before you decide how many parties you are going to attend on Tuesday night…
PRO TIP 3: “If you find yourself on the Golden Gate Bridge at 1:45AM with a bunch of people you didn’t know until 12:30AM then you are OK as long as they all have conference badges and seem to have fluency in Cybersecurity…
Wednesday morning kicked off with a bang at the Glilotcapital breakfast. We had quite a few great discussions with representatives from Atlassian, Intuit, Barclays and others.
Wednesday wrapped up with a CICC at JVP event and many more exciting discussions about cybersecurity, AIAST, DAST & AppSec.
The team was feeling a lot more relaxed (or sleep-deprived) by Thursday…
Overall this was an excellent conference and the follow up is keeping us very busy and will likely keep us busy for months to come.
Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, or want to learn more about RSA and how to navigate it correctly. After all, I survived my first #RSAC so I must be an expert.
