Child Entrepreneur Caleb Sima: Cofounder Of SPI Dynamics (Part 2)

SM: In the end, your parents did you a favor by taking away the television and forcing you into something more productive.

CS: My father took a particularly interesting approach to my activities. He helped me to make my first fake ID. I wanted to make a fake ID, and I downloaded all the items I needed and tested everything. My dad helped me do all of this and then gave me a piece of advice that has really helped me in my life. He said, “Caleb, you have a passion and an interest in being able to do these things, but you have to understand the difference between what is right and what is wrong. I will support your doing these things, but do not make the wrong decisions. Don’t use your knowledge to do these things improperly.”

I would sit at the dinner table and practice lock picking. I had a lock at the table, and I would sit there and open and close the lock. My father supported me, and that let me be open with my dad and tell him what I was doing. He was always able to adjust my path so that I was not doing things that were illegal or on the wrong side of the law. That really helped a lot in terms of keeping me out of prison and keeping me doing things the right way.

I was lucky enough to fall into doing that type of work in the corporate world very early on. My first job was entirely by accident. I was at my mom’s workplace reading computer books. At my age that was fairly rare. The network administrator walked by and saw me reading these books, so he started asking me questions. He felt I was up to date on computers and asked if I wanted to be an intern and help him run the network. According to the company I was too young to be an intern, but he really wanted me to help him out, so I became a contractor.

SM: How old were you?

CS: I was fifteen or sixteen. I started learning network administration from him, and in return I was able to show him how somebody could break into the network. I would sit there and show him how other employees could read the CEO’s e-mail. He freaked out, but at the time nobody thought about security. There was not a security role in a network shop. He was amazed at the ways I could break into the network. He then asked me how we could fix the problems, so we started fixing all the security holes.

Through my time there, network security became my specialty. I was amazed that security was not a bigger issue. I vividly remember sitting in the car and asking my mom if there was a way to get a job just doing security. She said there probably was, but she did not think it was a very good plan. She thought I was talking about being a security guard. I had to explain my whole idea of network security. She told me that companies did not even have positions for the type of role I described. I told her I thought I could make $50,000 a year if I just did security. She told me it might be a good start but that we should probably start looking at computer programming or something like that.

SM: What year are we talking about?

CS: That was 1994.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Child Entrepreneur Caleb Sima: Cofounder Of SPI Dynamics
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