The Violin Kid

Tales from the last Defcon

My first Defcon (4), I was 18 years old. I had $800 burning a hole in my pocket from a job bonus, and my boyfriend coaxed me into going. I still look back to this event as a critical, pivotal moment. I was part of a hacker scene, but I don’t think I would have become who I am today without the connectivity to the broader global hacker community.

This year, Defcon required masks to be on the conference floor. I didn’t want to wear one, but I was giving new people a tour of the event, and I wanted to be there the first time they had their experience, so I sucked it up. Their event, their rules — even if I view them as stupid.

Like many others who’ve attended Defcon over the years, I now view it as a reunion. A summer camp for computer geeks who like to wear cargo pants and black shirts. I no longer go to learn much but rather to catch up with friends. I have enough in my life keeping track of the financial markets and my day-to-day work that I don’t need to keep up with the latest and most remarkable exploits of the day, at least not for a living. There are people out there far more talented and capable than I ever was.

I’ll stick to my lane.

Defcon can get pretty monotonous, as it explores similar themes year after year, but very few radically change other than the venue. The people are roughly the same, just more of them. So, it would stick out immediately if you were to do anything different. Like, if you were a 16-year-old kid busking for a security certification program.

My friends and I were walking along the concourse hallways when a beautiful sound caught our attention. I glanced around and saw a rather tall young man with his eyes closed, and he was playing his heart out on a violin. His case stood open by his feet and was littered with a few dollars. Next to him was a sign asking to throw in some change if you liked his music so he could use it towards his education.

As you can imagine, I saw my former inner child at that moment. I saw all of our inner children. Sometimes people like to ask me how I come to some of the conclusions I do, and I explain that I get hit with “lightning bolts” and follow them. There’s no way to explain it other than a surge of positive energy that feels like a shock and begs me to pay attention. My subconscious mind is alerting my conscious mind that if I blink, I might miss something significant.

Given that I was with a group of people, I told myself I’d come back and put some money in his case on the way back and see how much he could drum up for himself. I would give him the rest of what he needed if he were close.

We did our rounds, and as we walked back, we heard sweet music emanating from the young man, and I had a vision. Years prior, my friend Michael Tiffany described as a “gentleman hacker,” and I was dreaming how fun it would be to shake things up at Defcon a bit. We wanted to “wake” people up from this repetitive groove they seemed to have found themselves in, so we imagined a world where a violin player followed us around, playing our soundtrack as we mingled with friends.

I looked at Michael, who was with me, and I said,

“Do you remember that dream we had years ago? The violin?”

Tiffany’s eyes lit up the only way he could, and he said…

“Oh yes….” Without hesitation, he could read my mind, “Go halvsies?”

The thing is, Tiffany had the same lightning bolt. He knew this was the moment if we were ever going to get one:

We walked straight up to the violin kid and grilled him about what he was raising money for and how much he’d grown. He hadn’t counted the money in his case yet, but it was overflowing. The problem is that dollar bills can look like a lot of money, and he had a ways to go.

So I said, “Well, how much would it take for you to shut that case and follow us around playing for us all day? Is that something you’d do?” He looked puzzled but thrilled. He told us we had to talk to his father, so we did, and he said he had to speak to his wife, so he did, and the next thing we were, sending her a Venmo payment. We agreed upon terms, and we all thought it would be a good idea if one of the kid’s adults tagged along so we didn’t have to explain to the police at some point that we were paying a minor to follow us around and make our day and by proxy everyone else’s more enjoyable.

As we were shutting down shop, another gentleman offered the Violin Kid the class for free. The kid was perplexed. What did he do now? I told him it didn’t change anything as we still needed our soundtrack and weren’t backing down. He could use this money for another class or equipment.

Those lightning bolts. My “gut.” My instincts. I can’t say they are usually correct, but they are right about getting me to pay attention, and I’ve had pretty good luck following them so far in my life. I sometimes joke it is the Universe guiding me, which maybe it is, but who knows? It’s a feeling.

That feeling told me this kid was unique, and that feeling said to me that we *needed* to help him, and it was urgent. The urgency of why became apparent not more than 2 minutes after he shut his case because Defcon security descended upon us. You could tell by the pain in their eyes that they didn’t want to ask him to stop, but someone, somewhere, told them they must. They cited that it was against the law in Nevada to busk, but we looked it up, which isn’t true. The real issue is that it is against their rules, but they didn’t know it yet, because nobody but this kid had ever done it before, so they needed to make one. They can’t have every hacker doing this now, can they?

An earnest but kind woman who volunteered for Defcon as a Goon explained this all to me calmly, and I smiled, which I think she did not expect, and said

“Don’t worry about it. He’s a professional now. We talked him out of being an amateur.” She looked perplexed and asked me if I was sure, to which I grinned and proudly defended him, “Yes, mam; he commands a decent rate.”

I don’t know if she understood my cryptic way of telling her that we hired him, but I think it was explained to the whole staff a few hours later after he delighted everyone everywhere for hours. This kid played on the escalator, in the elevator, inside a pirate ship, and down the hallways while people ate and danced. He played and played and didn’t give one shit about what it looked like or if anyone was judging him. He exuded pure joy, and it was contagious. We got out of the way, and wherever he went, he shined.

Meanwhile, back at my real job, my partners were cooking up a non-profit called the Inflection Grants, which is a program for handing 16-24-year-olds, no questions asked, $2000 to use for their purposes to propel their lives forward. For me, that money would have meant a laptop or a trip to Defcon. My partner Justin Mares was given a grant when he was young, which changed his life. What may seem like a small amount of money to some is a tectonic shift for others.

At one point, the Violin Kid looked at me and asked if he had entered another dimension or realm because he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. What he didn’t know was what was happening to me.

I knew that finding more young people like him, bright-eyed and hungry, would be a calling in my life and a purpose of my own that I needed to fulfill. I’ve made it, and it’s time now to give forward.

While the Violin Kid didn’t officially apply to be a grant recipient, as there was no way of knowing about it, we’ve decided to make him our first grantee because we feel he embodies the spirit of what we want to accomplish with this program.

Since announcing Inflection Grants, we’ve had over 400 applications, and we’re days away from launching the first batch of 20 people. We plan on staying in touch with each cohort and tracking how this infusion of capital changes their lives, and if we are lucky, maybe we’ll invest in one or two of them as entrepreneurs - or perhaps you will, but this money doesn’t have to be for a startup. It can pay off a student loan, buy a medical device, or be used for mental health. We care about the essay and how they respond to our questions.

These 400 people who applied come from all walks of life and from everywhere you can imagine. Right now, we are planting seeds, but we can’t wait to see what sort of trees they become.

Thank you, Violin Kid, for your spirit, for giving us a magical day in our lives, and for being a guiding light for what we know we need to build.