CacheCon

CacheCon

Fort Collins · Colorado · on the Cache la Poudre

$ whoami

Somebody has to be accountable

The whole rest of this site says you can be anonymous. The person taking your money cannot be. So, hello.

The person

My name is Richard Belisle. If you want to check there is a real person behind all of this, my LinkedIn profile is here.

Fair warning, and it is not a joke. That is an external link, and it is the only one on this entire website. Clicking it tells LinkedIn you were reading this page, which is precisely the sort of thing the rest of this site spends its time complaining about. Everything else here is served from this domain and phones nobody. Your call entirely.

The entity

CacheCon runs under Belisle Research and Security LLC. Not because that sounds impressive on a poster, but because somebody has to sign a venue contract and carry the insurance, and doing that as a private individual is how you end up losing your house over somebody else’s spilled drink.

Before anybody asks the obvious follow-up: no, I did not form a second LLC for the conference. I am too cheap. A dedicated entity is a few hundred dollars, an annual filing I would then have to remember, and a second set of books to keep, all for a first-year event that might draw ninety people.

And no, it is not a non-profit. Real 501(c)(3) status means a board, bylaws, a filing fee and a genuine pile of paperwork, and none of that is happening while I am still trying to settle whether this is one day or two. If CacheCon turns into something that recurs and grows, that conversation gets had again, in public, on this page.

The conflict, stated out loud

A security company is running a security conference. That is a conflict of interest. Here is what is being done about it, and you should hold me to every line:

  • The LLC gets nothing. No table, no talk, no sponsor slot, no logo, no mention from the stage. It is the legal wrapper this thing sits inside and nothing else. If you hear its name at the event, something has gone wrong.
  • You will not be sold anything. Not by me, not by anyone working with me. The regulations apply hardest to the person who wrote them.
  • The books get published. What came in, what went out, line by line, after the event. Ticket revenue, sponsor money, venue, food, gear, the band. If there is a surplus it goes to next year or back against the venue bill, and you will be able to see which.
  • If any of that stops being true, it changes on this page before it changes anywhere else.

On the money, since we are here

This is not my day job. The LLC does not make much money, which I mention not as a humble-brag but because you are entitled to know what the incentives actually are before you trust the program decisions. Nobody is getting rich off a two-room conference in Fort Collins in the off-season.

On paying, while we are on the subject. Yes, I will take Bitcoin. I would only gently point out that settling up for a privacy conference on a permanent, public, append-only ledger is roughly as anonymous as paying by retinal scan. Cash at the door costs nobody a transaction fee, leaves no chain to walk backward, and is the only genuinely private option on the table. Your call entirely.

The realistic outcome of running this is that I lose a couple of days and some money, and gain a room full of people I wanted to talk to anyway. That is the entire return.

Which is, more or less, the argument the whole thing was built out of. A conference stops being about you the moment somebody needs it to hit a number.

A footnote about this website

This site was largely built by an AI. I can write a detection rule. I cannot write CSS to save my life. A conference that goes on at length about disclosure should probably say that out loud rather than let you work it out from the source, so: there it is.

Three things that does not extend to.

  • The logo. The final conference artwork gets drawn by a real artist who gets paid real money for it. What is on this site today is a placeholder I had a machine generate, and it is going away.
  • The band. Human beings, instruments, a room, a volume level. No generated music, not for the show and not for anything played between talks.
  • The program. There will be limited AI content on the schedule, and that is an editorial decision rather than an oversight. This industry has spent three years talking about very little else and I am sick of it. If your work happens to involve a model, bring it. If you are hacking the model, bring it twice: breaking the thing has always been a different discipline from selling it, and that one never got boring.

I would rather sit through a talk about the metaverse, on the blockchain, than one more generic AI overview or another hour on defending your AI agents.

Unless it is novel, demonstrable, and cool as hell. Then it goes straight on the schedule and I will introduce it myself. That exception is doing a lot of work and it is meant to.

Questions about any of the above, including the ones you would rather ask in private: hello@cachecon.com.