The person
My name is Richard Belisle, and I am the main organizer of CacheCon. If you want to check there is a real person behind all of this, my LinkedIn profile is here.
Fair warning. That is an external link, and one of only a handful on this website. The others are on the front page, for our sponsors and community partners, who get an outbound link because a link is most of what we can give them. 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 Consulting LLC. That is a one-person company, and it exists as a liability wrapper around evenings and weekends vulnerability research: the part where you email a vendor to say their thing is broken and then find out what kind of vendor they are. It has no product, it is not after clients, and it is not my day job. CacheCon runs under it 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 research company is running a security conference. On paper that is a conflict of interest, and a conflict you have explained is still a conflict. So 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. 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 as it happens. A public ledger I post to as money moves, not a write-up assembled once it is all over and easy to tidy. What came in, what went out, line by line. 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. One caveat, stated here rather than discovered later: a sponsor can ask for their individual amount to sit in an aggregate line instead of against their name. They are still listed as a sponsor and the aggregate still reconciles, so the totals are whole either way. The exact limits of that are in their agreement.
- Sponsoring buys no time with my day job. I am a public sector employee, and I navigate conflict of interest rules there as well as here. Your sponsorship or support will not get you time with me as a representative of my employer, and it is not a way to get in front of them. The opposite, in fact: anyone who supports this conference will be excluded from any current or future purchasing decisions or evaluations I take part in. Sponsor with that in mind.
- If any of that stops being true, it changes on this page before it changes anywhere else.
On the money, since we are here
The LLC does not make much money. You are entitled to know what the incentives here actually are before you trust anybody’s program decisions, including mine, and nobody is getting rich off a one room conference in Fort Collins in the off-season.
On paying, while we are on the subject. Bitcoin is fine. Cash at the door is fine too, costs nobody a transaction fee, and is the most private option on the table. Your call entirely.
One ask, if cash at the door is your plan: send a quick note to hello@cachecon.com beforehand. Not your name, not if you would rather not give it. Just a heads up that one more person is coming. Head count is how we work out how much food to order and how many chairs to put out, and it is the one number we cannot guess our way to. Paying privately should not mean we end up short on lunch.
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 case 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 it 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, if we get one. 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.
Questions about any of the above, including the ones you would rather ask in private: hello@cachecon.com.