I’m tired AF so naturally I’m awake but I keep thinking about my research and what it means and all the insightful things people said in hallways that changed the way I look at things.

I volunteered to review resumes for Cyversity at RSAC this year. If you know me then you know I love volunteering. I keep telling people that I got really lucky in life so I really want to give back. Remember those tiny resume cards I made at BSides? This time, in addition to writing the notes on the back, I would write the order of how their resume should be. Since I had the stickers that went along with the “FREE FOSSIL UPGRADE” story I threw that in there with my tiny coloring book. On every one I’d write their name and “You can do it! – Rhea Lynn” and one person said, “That note is really helpful” and I thought, “Awww.”

After that I wandered back into the main expo, which honestly has to be one of the circles of hell, but since it was the last day there were a lot less people, and thus a lot more tolerable. Since I focus on early stage, we spent most of our time in the medium and early stage portions of the expo, but it’s important to compare what the really big companies do too.

I think about how the booth sizes and how the strategy changes. In the early stage expo the tables are super small, they’re more like airline ticket counters or bank tellers and all the vendors are lined up right next to each other. That absolutely limits the amount of swag and forces real conversations because there’s nowhere to sit and a lot less distractions. When you go to the startups in the middle you get a bigger space. Bigger counters and TV screens. A lot more swag. One place had a seating area, some places had games. The super big booths, like Drata and Microsoft, are like tiny planets with a crazy amount of swag and gamified demos to trading your time for fancier swag. I saw a boxing ring, the biggest blow up skeleton probably in the world, and a virtual reality motion space machine. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but that’s a lecture for another time.

I went back to my favorite booths for the mid stage companies to tell them how awesome they were and ended up doing a live demo and breakdown of a booth for one of them. Excited to see how it’s going to shape their GTM moving forward. I ran through a couple more website breakdowns on the Early Stage Expo too. It’s funny, I don’t have a booth but I ended up doing demos of my methodology anyway.

I was wiped AF by the time I got to the closing ceremony. My friend was like, it’s super fun. I missed half of it since I was in the Early Stage Expo until it closed, which was probably a good idea because the closing ceremony was loud and I was tired. My friend tried to get me to go to the front where he was dancing. Fuck that, I can barely keep my eyes open. I sat in the back and ran into one of my other friends and absolutely fell asleep somehow between loud music and Hugh Jackman but since I have no idea how that’s related to cybersecurity and was running on fumes, I just passed out.

I got some email about getting a free backpack and wearable because I was a college day participant. The backpack was pretty cool honestly, and I haven’t gotten a new backpack since my Cisco days. Somehow my boss back then got me a super fancy Hugo Boss backpack so I never needed a new one.

Anyway, as I was repacking my bags into a more manageable set of bags I congratulated the person next to me on making it through RSAC. Somehow it ended up with me with a speaking engagement, and her saying that it sounds like I have a lot to say. LOL maybe. She was really cool though and gave me some advice on not taking shit from people and speaking up after I told her about some of my experiences as a female founder. I processed a lot of it before, but it’s still good to have some support.

I was on the waitlist for some founder event but I only had to wait a few minutes before they let me in. I told my friend about it and he had to wait 30 min.

I’m still deep into research so whenever I go to these things I’m never really selling anything. I have products, but I’m also cognizant of my mental load and I’m working with an early stage startup while still doing research. When I was going over my historical analysis about war budgeting and cybersecurity as well as the increase in scrutiny, the guy next to me said, “Spoken like a real consultant! You must have been in cybersecurity long!” No sir, no I have not lol, I just see a lot of patterns and then they keep me up at night and then the numbers fly out of my face like in “A Beautiful Mind” but for cybersecurity and a lot more fancy snacks. Seriously, I met a different guy at the same event and we rated the snacks together. He was right, the chicken skewers were the best. But the bruschetta though, eh. It was ok.

For RSAC I was planning on doing some dollar demos. It’s a long story but anyway the end of the story is, I didn’t do any demos and I just decided to make random dollar shirts for people and hand them out to people. They’re fun! When we were outside, I had a chat with this guy and I told him, not enough people are nice just to be nice anymore. Like everything now seems so transactional. I told him, I made him this tiny shirt and now he gets a cool present and maybe that will make him have a good day and he can pass on that good feeling to someone else and they can too and so on and so forth. He seemed to like that. I like it too!

Not everything has to be transactional.

Dollar T-Shirts given: Lots
Impromptu Floor Demos: At least 3, I don’t remember dude it’s been a long six days
Snacks ranked: 3
Times I fell asleep in front of Wolverine: 1
Times I’m glad I it was over: 1