Child Entrepreneur Caleb Sima: Cofounder Of SPI Dynamics (Part 3)

SM: By 1994 the Internet was getting started.

CS: Yes, folks like AOL were big at that time. I was still reading on DBS, and I was hooking up with local groups. CompuServe opened up a whole new world by allowing us to publish text files and learned knowledge by posting into newsgroups that were security oriented. The only way I could get on CompuServe was through two different routes. One was semi-legal, the other was legal. I will tell you about the legal one.

I would take five to ten floppy disks and download CompuServe on the disks. I downloaded a lot of viruses because I was really interested in how they worked. I spent a lot of time with assembly language. I continued to work for the company I mentioned, augmenting their network administration, before I was ultimately let go. That was my first experience with corporate backstabbing.

Since I had no job, I wrote a resume explaining my interest in security and I posted that on a job board. This was the time when pagers were big, so I put my pager number on my resume. Soon I received a page describing a dedicated security position and the phone number for the recruiter. Unfortunately, the pager left off the last four digits of the number. I dialed the pager company and went through just about every person in the company until I found somebody who could help me retrieve those last four digits.

Once I had the number, I called and found out it was for a company called Security First. They were the world’s first online bank. The job was for a security administrative assistant based in Atlanta. The recruiter arranged an interview for me. At the time I was sixteen and living in Jasper, Georgia. I was living with a friend and his dad because I had ran away from home six months earlier.

SM: Why did you run away from home?

CS: I ran away from home because I had been kicked out of a lot of schools. That is why I never finished high school. I was living with my mom, and I got kicked out of two schools. She did not know what to do with me, so she sent me to live with my dad in Florida. I got kicked out of two schools in Florida. He did not know what to do with me, so he sent me back up to live with my mom. My stepdad put me on restriction from reading or touching anything involving computers for a year because no other punishment bothered me. I had to run away because I knew that computers were the only thing in life I loved.

SM: Did you have a job lined up when you ran away?

CS: No, I didn’t. I had no place to go, so I went to live with my best friend and his dad in Jasper. That is where I was living when I ran into the opportunity to interview with Security First. The interview was two hours away from where I lived, so I had to wake up at 4 a.m. to get there in time. I left early in the morning while it was raining, and I wrecked my car. I had to walk a mile back to the house, in the rain, and wake up my friend. I borrowed his suit which was three times bigger than my size, and I got his dad to drive me to the interview.

The guy who interviewed me was the grouchiest guy I had ever seen in my life. He was old and sour. He came in and quizzed me on firewalls. I told him about zero day exploits and how to bypass firewalls. I explained various sniffing techniques, which at the time was cutting edge. He would just look at me and did not say a word. He just stared at me. After he asked his questions, he got up and walked out of the room. I sat there for ten minutes but nobody came back in the room. I was positive I had blown the job.

Finally an HR rep came in the room. He said, “Caleb, you did a great job on your interview and we would like to present you with a job offer,” which shocked me. I became the security administrative assistant S1. At the time S1 was the online banking platform that everyone used. I started looking at banking transactions over the Internet from a security perspective.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Child Entrepreneur Caleb Sima: Cofounder Of SPI Dynamics
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