Ryan Lester Email & Phone Number

I've had a passion for technology for as long as I can remember. I loved tinkering with computers as a kid, and was really excited when my mom got us our first Internet connection through AOL.I started getting into Linux when I switched to Ubuntu 6.10 in my freshman year of high school, which quickly became a gateway drug to Bash scripting and learning to program in Python. I started studying computer science in school the following year, and knew right away that it would become my career. It was also around this time that my childhood friend Josh and I developed a bit of a cypherpunk bent, becoming early adopters of crypto back when 1 BTC was 76¢, as well as other privacy technologies such as Tor and OTR end-to-end encryption. This turned out to be another lifelong passion, as we took a hobby interest in security and became increasingly engaged with the subject over time.At Carnegie Mellon, I really enjoyed learning low-level programming and approaching it with a security mindset, which I put to use as one of the winners of Stripe's first capture the flag competition. Later on at SpaceX, Josh and I would collaborate on QA work with an eye for stamping out internal software vulnerabilities. We eventually went on to build Cyph, a startup we founded with the mission of making online privacy accessible to everyone.In the course of working on Cyph, I've been issued 10 patents, spoken at conferences such as Black Hat and DEF CON, collected bug bounties from Google, developed popular open source cryptographic libraries, and extensively worked on all layers of our stack and business.Beyond security, I have significant experience with full-stack web development. I'm most comfortable with TypeScript, Angular, Go, Node.js, and Google Cloud, but have worked with a wide variety of languages, frameworks, and platforms.I'm currently working on WebSign, an offshoot of Cyph that makes our technology available for third-party applications. WebSign is a static website host (like Firebase Hosting or Netlify) with baked-in quantum-resistant code signing, to defend web applications from man-in-the-middle attacks now and in the future.Feel free to contact me at hacker@linux.com.

Listed skills include Entrepreneurship, Cryptography, Software Development, Open Source Software, and 1 others.