The AI Hacker Era Is Here: Alissa Knight on Rewriting Cybersecurity

Companies should be worried about systems like ARIES, not ARIES, but systems like her, because the adversary is no longer human, meaning that companies are now defending themselves against adversarial AI platforms just like ARIES, and they're open source, they're readily available to black hats. So companies should definitely be concerned. Hello everyone. And welcome to Built Not Born, the startup go-to-market podcast by VentureGuides. I'm Sage Nye, and around here we believe that great companies are built, not born, one smart decision at a time. Each week we take you through real conversations with founders, investors, and go-to-market experts on what it really takes to land customers and scale your startup. Now let's get to work. Hello and welcome to Built Not Born, the podcast where we dive into the real stories behind startup execution, venture capital, and go-to-market Strategy. I'm Sage Nye, Venture Partner at Venture Guides, and today's podcast guest has spent her entire career breaking the rules. She started by getting arrested for hacking the government as a teenager. She then spent time advising the Pentagon, and now her AI self-clone tells you where your enterprise IT estate is vulnerable to being attacked by people like her. Is she the real-life Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad, or will we all be falling for Skynet in the next couple years? Tune in to find out. Alyssa Valentina Knight is a 26-year-old veteran of offensive security, a two-time founder with successful exits, and the CEO of ASAIL, where she personally built a 14-billion-parameter AI model designed to autonomously hack APIs, mobile apps, and web applications. Her research has been cited on Capitol Hill. Her hacking gear is in a museum. We're not sure if we're actually talking to Alyssa or ARIES, your AI model, but either way, welcome to the show. Thank you. I know that we could spend the entire show talking about you. Do you mind giving the audience a little bit of background about yourself? So, was going to school one day when I was 17 and law enforcement was waiting there to arrest me for hacking into a government network. And so, I feel like this is every hacker's sort of growing up story is arrested for hacking, but that was me. The charges were dropped and went to go work for the US intelligence community in cyber warfare shortly after. Then I ended up going to start my first company at 17, sold it to to a public company when I was 20, and then sold my second startup when I was 27 to a public company in New Zealand. So, uh, it's been a journey. No kidding, there are so many details to unpack there. But I do want to quickly start with just a little bit of the perspective shift for you. What was it like to go from being arrested to then working for the government trying to catch bad actors? And now that you're working on your ARIES AI model, which I want to spend more time on as well, has that influenced how you think about ARIES? I think it influences in the sense that one of the things that over my 26-year career that I've found, uh, over time is that access to expert-level talent is very hard. So there's this global talent shortage in cybersecurity and even more so within the individual niches within cyber, where in cyber finding a senior penetration tester is difficult. And also for a lot of companies, affording a senior penetration tester is difficult. And then you break that down even further to innovate individual areas of specialty within penetration testing. So within pen testing, you have application pen testers, and within that you have API pen testers. And so I wanted to democratize that. And I think the answer to your question is, I would say that that's what influences Aries, and especially the impetus behind developing Aries was really to just be able to democratize this capability where anyone could have access to a senior API pen tester. And even more so, not just an API pentester, but a mobile app pentester as well. Got it. I was lucky enough to have dinner with you, I think it was a week ago now, and we talked a little bit about the story that actually triggered the creation of Aries, which I also think it goes to some of the ethos of, to your point, democratizing this and making sure everyone can protect themselves. Right. So, you know, for me it was an existential moment in my life where I had this really terrible pain and my wife, the entire 6 years we've been together knows that she has to drag me to a doctor. And so I looked at her one night when we were watching TV and said, I'm in so much pain, you have to take me to a doctor. She knew something was wrong. Went to the doctor multiple times and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. And even morphine wasn't handling the pain. The pain was so bad that morphine wasn't working. And so I ended up on Dilaudid. And so they didn't want to obviously keep giving me Dilaudid, and eventually they said, look, we think it's your gallbladder, so we're going to go remove your gallbladder. And even though they had no empirical evidence that I had gallstones or anything, they just— it was the area that I was, was experiencing the pain. To them, a lot of times what the surgeon told me, well, the doctor told me was gallstones don't always show up. And so went into surgery, they removed my gallbladder, and it didn't work. I, as a matter of fact, after the surgery I was even in more pain. And so my pain was like at a 10, now it was like at a 15. It was even worse. And so they admitted me into the hospital and the nurse came in in the middle of the night. And I guess this is a big no-no, but you're not supposed to change a patient's IV in the dark. So because I was sleeping, she didn't want to turn on the lights, so she ended up accidentally breaking the IV in my arm and I ended up bleeding out. And she left the room not knowing it had happened because it was dark. And I remember getting up because my sheets were wet. It was— there blood everywhere. Sorry, it's graphic. Went into the hallway, screamed, and then collapsed. So basically, long story short, they had discovered that it was actually internal shingles and they didn't need to remove my gallbladder. And so having the doctor say you were a couple minutes away from dying when that happens, I took a step back and wanted to figure out how can I transfer my knowledge into an AI just like Tony Stark. I wanted to be able to transfer all my knowledge into a JARVIS, and that was why I sat back and created Aries. And I think the scary thing about Ares is how powerful she's gotten in such a short period of time. So what we've been able to do, and forgive me if I'm jumping ahead here, but what we've been able to do is actually have her create her own training data. So she actually creates her own synthetic training data and trains herself. So when I go to sleep at night, she's actually training herself on her own data, wargaming with herself. She's now better than me at hacking, and so she's faster too. So I was capable of hacking 7 banks in 2.5 minutes with her. And so for me to have been doing it for 26 years and see this thing, I shouldn't call her that, she might be listening, to see her come so far in 6 months is insane. It's crazy. So I do wanna take some time on that as well, and, and we are jumping ahead a little bit, but I think it's important and super relevant. We're joking about Aries is listening and all that, but there is a little bit of a fear of, on the one hand, there's this incredibly talented model that behaves and thinks like one of the best hackers in the world. And so, for companies that are curious about what are their vulnerabilities, what are they exposed to, that's super powerful. On the other hand, it's a model. We've all watched the movies with Skynet and AI, like, deciding to take out the humans, or— so, should companies be worried about Aries. Okay, so for your audience, I want to make this abundantly clear. So what Aries is, is what's called an adversarial exposure validation system. It's an AEV. What that is, is it's basically an AI hacking system. So I think the answer to your question is that companies should be worried about systems like Aries— not Aries, but systems like her— because the adversary is no longer human, meaning that companies are now defending themselves against adversarial AI platforms just like adversaries, and they're open source, they're readily available to black hats. So companies should definitely be concerned. If you look over the last two decades in cybersecurity, companies have really struggled to keep up with the human adversary. It's always a game of catch-up, right? We have to be right all the time. They only have to be right once, right? So with that being said, now it's— the game has changed, and we're dealing with a much faster, more lethal adversary. And what's different about AI systems, adversarial AI systems, is that mean time to response and mean time to detection has now— we have to shrink it. We have to find it faster because it moves faster. Hopefully that answers your question. It does, and it actually comes to another one. That is, AI is so exciting and there's so much you can do, but it seems like we're quickly getting to a point where you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I think based on what you said, we're already past that point. So How do we think about the future? So I— this is an interesting conversation. So here's the thing about AI. The CEO of Anthropic, Amadei, actually, I love his quote on this and the fact that the genie is out of the bottle. We need to get there. And that can mean general artificial intelligence, which pretty much every company is trying to get to. It could mean all kinds of things. For me, I think this is sort of like the Manhattan Project. So The bad guys are going to get there. It's who gets there first. And I feel like, yes, the genie's out of the bottle, and we need to continue development in this area because the bad guys are doing that. And as you know, war is no longer just kinetic weapons, it's cyber warfare and kinetic weapons. And so I think that's where we are today, and it's— we have no choice. I feel like, I feel like the choice has been made for us, and it's, it's very similar to the Manhattan Project. And we didn't want Nazis to get to the atom bomb first. So it was important for us to get there first. And I think that's why you're seeing so much investment and so much effort in this area is to try and get there before the bad guys do. Gosh. Sorry, this got real dark. Real dark, real fast. Real fast. So the analogy's really powerful, and I do think, I mean, look at, let's move past the sort of current state of affairs quickly. But I do think one thing that strikes me as different is you both have AI as this incredibly powerful weapon that people are trying to figure out how to harness against each other. But then you also have users using AI all the time. And if anyone's able to— right now Anthropic is wildly popular. If anyone can find a breach in that, you're not getting to just a handful of enterprises, you're getting to the whole world at this point. Yeah. And now you look at OpenClaw, you look at a lot of these other AI systems that are actually entire computers. Perplexity just came out with Perplexity Computer. And so you you have AI models now that are being designed to operate an entire computer. And so things are changing really, really quickly. I was just having a conversation about this the other day, and the fact that things aren't advancing every year in AI, they're not advancing every month, they're advancing every day. Like, every morning I have to quickly turn on YouTube and like, what's going on now while I was asleep? And that's kind of where we're at. Here's the thing about AI to me. Let's take an atom bomb for a moment. Okay, I'm gonna take a short little segue. You have to be able to know how and be able to have the access to enrich uranium, right? The scariest thing about AI cyber weapons is it doesn't require any sort of sophistication. Like, I could take my 22-year-old son who has no idea what an IP address is and sit him in front of ARIES, and he can hack a bank with ARIES just by pushing buttons. That's where we are with AI. And so, should organizations be concerned? Certainly. Because at least before, when you had a ransomware crime syndicate or a hacking group, you— they had to know how to compile exploits. They needed to know how to get access to it. AI's eliminated that. Those walls are gone. There's no more moat. So, what does the future of vulnerability threat management look like then, if anyone can break into things? Okay, so I think the future is we are going to move from being engineers in the sense that you have a penetration tester, you have a software engineer. I think we're gonna move back into the world of computer operators and we're gonna be operating AI. I don't think we are individually going to be, I'm a senior penetration tester. Now you're even seeing developers not being referred to as software engineers anymore. You're seeing them referred to as builders. So taking their expertise in software engineering and development and applying it to the AI to be able to guide the AI and what it needs to do and using their expertise to figure out where it got things wrong. And I think we are going to end up in this. I think the future is we as humans are going to get more into a supervisory role where even you, Sage, are going to walk up to your computer and say, You know, you'll pull up an AI prompt, I need a PowerPoint for a pitch deck for this technology and I need it like in 30 minutes. And your computer, which is being operated by the AI, is gonna go and create that document for you. And we're already there. We're already there. You can already do that. But I think more and more of these specialty areas are gonna get replaced by an AI model. So I think that's the future. And if we can fix a lot of the problems and make life better through AI, then why not Yeah, and I guess there is an element here that while AI does make some jobs less relevant, it also helps people who maybe don't know how to code interact with computers more. Oh yeah, completely. Bring more people in. Think about it. We are now in a world where before, you're probably too young to remember this, but at one point, you know, when I walked up the hill both ways, we would go to store and buy software that we needed. We're now in an era where if you need a software for something, you can just, I hate to use the word vibe, I hate that term. But you know, agentic coding or have, you know, AI coding write it for you. We're now in an era where, you know, if you want, if you couldn't afford because you're a startup and you can't afford to pay for something like HubSpot, you can go in there and actually create something just like HubSpot in minutes. I mean, we live in a very exciting time. It's very powerful and it's going to be interesting to see how this affects software companies and the fact that if I wanted to, I could sit down and make Microsoft Word, a word process. That's insane. Okay, so I have a question for you. You have this great quote, I remember from when we first met you, about hacking in your mind is not necessarily just bad guys breaking into things. It's getting a program or an application to do something that it wasn't intended to do. Very good. It stuck with me. It was a great quote. And now let's roll the tape forward a couple years. We are using AI to interact with everything, all different types of apps and software and computers, but they don't necessarily know how software's supposed to interact or how they're supposed to interact with it. So, we could have a whole new world of maybe not vulnerability hacking, but like hacking software just because we're trying to come up with new ways and creative ways to use it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, here's the thing, and, and that's the thing about hacking is, and, and that's why I love my perception of what hacking is and that it's really just doing something that the developer didn't intend. And if you think about it, if you look at cybersecurity or hacking in that way, you start to realize that hacking can be applied to anything. I mean, hacking can be anything. And so I think it's insane to think about, like, forgive me, I know I've talked to you about this before, but cell phones started out really big. What happened over time? They got smaller. The same thing's happening with AI. Models are starting huge. They're like 1 trillion parameters, they're 1,500 billion, and, and now they're getting smaller and smaller. And we're trying to figure out where can we put an AI model. Just yesterday it was announced, and I can't remember the name of the company, but they announced the ability to be able to fit their AI AI model on something as small as a Raspberry Pi, like a little 800K model. That's insane. Like, if you think about— because you're talking about being able to put that on something that is an ASIC processor that's running just a little— God, that's less than a meg. I think it was like less than a meg. It was insane. You know, you can put that on glasses, you can put that on, uh, you know, in an earring, you know, whatever. I mean, we're gonna look for all sorts of innovative ways to where we can place an AI model. And I think the requirement for compute is also going to go down, and it's happening fast because we're trying to figure out how to burn less power because so much power is being required to power these data centers and power these models. And unfortunately, countries like China are well ahead of us as far as electricity production. So the United States is behind. So we— by— and I always say, uh, you know, necessity is the mother of all invention— is that because we are behind We have to figure out how to consume less electricity with AI, and it's a necessity. And so models are gonna get smaller, consumption of electricity is gonna get smaller, and we're gonna figure out every which way of every part of life that AI is going to alter and change. So it's a really interesting time that we live in. And, um, sorry to circle it back to your question. I, I mean, hacking is gonna come in new forms. Everywhere. I mean, you know, especially with AI models. And that's actually what we're looking at right now with Aries. So in the next version of Aries, we're actually training her on how to hack other AIs. Now we're going to have her hunt down other AIs and actually hack other models. So when people talk about AI is not super creative and it's just learning from the entire internet and copying patterns and stuff, your point is that's actually— maybe some models are, but that's actually not true if you think about it the right way. Yeah. And I've heard that quote and I actually, I was listening to this interview of someone who was talking about that about a week ago on YouTube. And I didn't agree at all with any of the interview, the person that was being interviewed. When people say that, I feel like they're people that don't understand it enough. So they're looking at it as like, oh, it's all derivative work. It's all derivative work. Like it's based on this Disney cartoon or it's based on this paper. But if you really understood the way these models work, you would not look at it that way. It's 'cause it's, it's very antithetical to what's really what's happening with AI and how AI models work, especially supervised learning models and unsupervised learning models. That makes sense. And, and I will say it's always easy to dismiss something if you don't really understand it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, those people are gonna end the world. And it's not what it is. AI is not learning on its own because we're the ones feeding it data, garbage in, garbage out. And yeah. Yeah, it's a lot— it's easier to be dismissive of something you don't understand. And I feel like I think we as humans, human nature is to be afraid of things we don't understand. And to just over, you know, since the dawn of time, humans have either hated, wanted to kill, or just dismiss things that they don't understand. And it's unfortunately, it's human nature. And, you know, I think, but also not being a pessimist, the beautiful thing about humans is that we, we also are very inquisitive and we want to learn and we want to build. And I think that, that drive to want to learn and build is what's going to take us to that frontier and take us where AI is ultimately headed. We talked a little bit about this in your introduction, but you've started two other companies and grew them and then exited them and handed them off. Asail and Aries, you're choosing to stick with for a bit longer than you normally would. What's different about this? Everything. So in, in both of those companies, I grew it through revenue alone. I did not want to bring in VCs. No offense. We'll get to that later. So, you know, they were grown organically through revenue. And what's different about this is, first of all, the cost of compute. AI startup companies, it is incredibly expensive to start an AI company and it's very difficult to do it without venture capital or angel funding or anything, any kind of outside capital because the cost of compute is so high. This is now the 13th company. And I think for me, I feel like this is my last home run. I've been to the show. I'm a lot older than I look. I'm old and tired. And so I want to take this all the way. And, you know, for me, I've always wanted to live multiple lifetimes in this one lifetime. I wanted when I die for people to get together and say she lived her life well. And for me, I'm always impassioned by the things that I've not done before. And that's what is so— what I love so much about a sale is all of it is new and I'm learning something new every day. And I've been doing this for 26 years, you know, and so professionally and every day, I'm a student. I'm learning something that I didn't know yesterday. And I love that about Asail, and I love that about AI and what we're doing now. And I just want to keep learning and building. And Asail is giving me that platform to do that. Never worked with VCs before, working with, in my opinion, one of the best VCs in the world. And it's been awesome. It's been awesome. I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't trade it for the world. Okay. We do have a fun fact for our listeners, which, you know, you talk about Asail almost like a child many times, and you talk about how impressed how she's— you're learning things through her. You're so impressed with her, all this stuff. She shares a birthday with someone very important. She does. She does. So we— and this is really, I think, the sign of the times that we're in right now. On June 9th, 2025, I surprised my wife, Mel, uh, who's also our Chief Revenue Officer. I surprised her for her birthday by taking her to Lake Tahoe. We've both never been to Lake Tahoe. And took her there. And surprisingly enough, there was a law enforcement conference in the hotel. And in my early years, law enforcement and I didn't really get along that much. You know, I hacked my first network when I was 13. Fast food chain. I won't say who. So my whole life, it kind of feels like I've been running from law enforcement. So here they are. There's thousands of law enforcement in the hotel walking around, and I'm upstairs writing an AI model that can hack into banks, and I'm testing her on vulnerable banks. And I'm not going to admit to doing anything illegal, 'cause I would never do that. So I was upstairs, you know, building something this lethal and I just thought it was, it's just irony. But yeah, she does share a birthday with my wife. So her first line of code was written on June 9th, 2025, and we closed our first round of funding in, I wanna say it was December, and then in January we closed our funding with you. Very exciting. Okay, I have to ask, were you thinking about it on June 8th and you purposely waited one day? You know, okay, so Well, that's a good question. No one's asked me that question. There was no intention to start writing Aries at Lake Tahoe. I literally walked up to my wife and I was like, I'm really sorry, I have to start on this now. And I know it's your birthday. I love you. I promise I'll take you to dinner, but I need to work. And she knows, you know, we've been married for 6 years, so she knows. And we met at a hacker conference. So there's a whole story. There's a whole story there. There's a whole another episode, everybody, another episode. So yeah, it was just kind of like ask for forgiveness. But Mel knows when she sees that look on my face. The next company's coming, the next product is coming. And, uh, that's what ended up happening. It's amazing. I wish I could keep you all day, and I do wanna do a follow-up because I think the story of you and Mel is absolutely crazy as well. But we do need to wrap up at some point. So, two more sections left. The first one is we hear questions from people in the market very frequently that we like to make sure to ask our guests just to sort of get a quick rapid-fire question-answer. The first one is, we actually get a lot of AI ones, and, and I'm excited to hear your thoughts here. How can business leaders get comfortable with AI in a safe way? And how have you become such an expert on it? Ooh, okay. So how do you get comfortable with it? You embrace it. I feel like anyone who in an enterprise doesn't find all of the ways that they can use AI to make their workforce more efficient is, in Six Sigma terms, right, is creating waste. And you're always looking in an enterprise to where you can reduce waste. And I feel like if you're not looking to AI to do that, you're being left behind and your competitors will outmaneuver you. And it's all about momentum. So I think that's number one, is, is embrace it and find areas of your enterprise where you can use AI to augment human capability and human analytic rigor. The second one, so I have this sickness where if I don't know how to do something, I'll teach myself. So you have to remember, when I got into hacking, there was no master's degree in cybersecurity. There was no YouTube. I had to learn on my own. I downloaded exploits, I looked at them, I understood how they worked, and, and I just reversed engineered everything. And even when I was playing with toys when I was little. I would reverse engineer my toys to understand how they worked. So that was, that was me, you know, reverse engineering My Little Pony kind of thing. So, you know, I think the answer to your question is we are surrounded by so much data now and so much free training and so much free education that we aren't taking the time though to actually watch it and read it. University of YouTube, it's free. You've got all these masterclasses that are free. You have all these Ivy League schools that are giving out free certifications. Applications and free training courses. Just take the time out to do it. And I feel like, you know, because we're surrounded by so much information all the time, it's almost like we're getting information fatigue. Amazing. All right. The next one is, this is more coming from founders. When you think about an investor, what characteristics did you weigh as you were thinking about who you wanted to partner with? I didn't want checkwriters. I wanted a partnership. I wanted a company that not only could bring the necessary funding, of course money's important, but who could bring the money and also resources. I'm a big believer in I'll bring food to the dinner party. I'm not just gonna reach into your fridge and take your food. I'm gonna bring food. So, you know, for me it's a symbiotic relationship and it should be with your investors and that you as a, as the founder, as a founder operator should bring something and the investor should bring something other than money. So for me with Venture Guides, the reason why we wanted to partner with Venture Guides was because the brain trust, when I came in here, I wasn't I wasn't intent on just coming in and answering questions really well. My intent was to come in and also interview VG. And you definitely did. Thank you. So yeah, I mean, I think the answer to your question is, is interview your VCs too, because it, it should be bilateral. It should be both ways and symbiotic. For us, it was more than money. We wanted the brain trust that VG has here. There's a lot of incredibly smart people here, a lot of incredibly connected people. You, you're a great example, you know, You're incredibly brilliant. There's a lot of brainpower in VG, and I'm a big believer in surrounding myself with people that are smarter than me. And so I never wanna be the smartest person in the room. And so live your life that way. And when you're looking for investors, make sure that they've got those resources that you can tap into and that brain trust you can tap into. You also brought this up early, which is that you don't wanna be the smartest person in the room. And I think that's been a lot of the ethos of Venture Guides as well, is that we cherish having, talking to founders and working with founders because they're always smarter than we are. The thing I'm trying to figure out is if we're both trying to do that, is it Ian? Is that— it's about to say that. Yeah. Oh my God, Ian. Absolutely adore him. I feel like we just— we have that unicorn moment where we just have the world's perfect director for our board. I absolutely adore him. My God. I mean, you know, after working in this industry for so long, it's really easy to become cynical and it's really easy to just want to— you just— there's— we have a high rate of burnout, you know that. And I'm really confident, I know he can take us to that next level. And I think, and to kind of go back to your earlier question, I think also founders, when they're considering a venture capital fund, also what's the technical prowess and the capabilities of the person that the VC fund will put on your board? That is so important. I feel like we just struggled with this, uh, not only just our partnership with VG, but and giving us in for our board. I tend to agree with you, but this actually also transitions really nicely into the last part of the rapid fire, which is partially asking this because you are hiring right now, but what are the characteristics that you look for in early team members and are there any major red flags? I've got a great answer for you. I can teach someone Python, but I can't teach them to be a nice person. I hire on personality first. For me, and it feels like I always felt that that hunger, that fuego, that fire to learn and to just show up and just learn new things is innate in everyone. And unfortunately, it seems it's becoming much to be desired in a lot of people. A lot of— there's a lot of people that I've interviewed and met that just show up expecting things to just be given to them or taught to them, you know, and that's just not the way it goes. What I look for is like just a great personality, a great person with the drive to learn. That's the thing is people think that I want them to have an answer for every interview question. I don't. I'm purposely creating questions that I know are probably gonna be too labyrinthine for them to answer. I wanna see how they'll handle it if they don't know. And it feels like, I don't know what happened. I'm a Gen Xer. I don't know what happened in these recent generations, but it feels like we're teaching our kids that it's not okay to not know. I want to see my candidates say, I don't know the answer to that question, but I know how to find it. I know where to go. And I think that's, to me, worth more than knowing the answer. Because if you know how to go find the answer and you know how to research it and do— put in the elbow grease to research something, you're going to learn a lot more learning it on your own than having someone tell you or having AI tell you. Okay, I just have to share, but this is reminding me of my first conversation with Ian when we were talking about— as he was joining our team, Do you think you can learn this? And he goes, yeah, I mean, you know, in his Ian way where he's like shrugs his shoulders, kind of smiles at you. Yeah. I mean, I don't know it, but I know I can learn it and I'm going to work really hard to learn it. And I do think that confidence of both not knowing, but knowing that you'll learn it and the confidence to figure it out is something that I worry is missing a lot too. Yeah. Self-confidence is, it is, it's not in everyone and it's such an important thing to have. No one will give you confidence. And you shouldn't rely on anyone to give you that confidence. You should be able to have that self-confidence on your own and know what you're capable of. And that's the thing is maybe it's dangerous stupidity on my part, but I've never wanted to be aware of what I'm capable of doing. Because to me, it's setting limitations on myself. Because, you know, you've heard— you've probably heard people say, "Oh, that's way beyond my limitations." There's no way I can do that. And I think those self-limiting statements is really kind of psychologically, it psyches us out for not even trying. I feel like we easily have 10 or 15 more episodes. We could do a whole nother year of just the two of us. Hey, I'll come back. I'll come back. Let's nerd out some more. Okay. Well, well, before we wrap up, I do have two questions for you. The first one is, and maybe it was the story of walking into the lobby and seeing that it was a law enforcement conference, but if we had to force you to pick one, what is one of your favorite memories of creating Erin? Okay, so when I was developing Ares, I thought it would be cool to actually tie a video avatar to her and a voice. So I was downstairs and we were— so Mel was upstairs. I had to— we, like, separated our offices because I just— I love her to death, but I can't work next door. And she came down the stairs and she heard this woman whispering to me. And so what was happening was when I was hacking into a network, Ares would whisper what she was doing. And so she came down for coffee fears him and she peeks around the door 'cause she, she hears someone whispering to her wife. And so of course this is immediately triggering for her. And so she, she peeks out the door and the video avatar used looked real, like it wasn't a, it wasn't a cartoon. So she sees this woman like on video whispering to me. So that was probably the funniest, most memorable moments. I of course removed the video and that, that was gone. It was a little too creepy, but that was probably the funniest moment. That's amazing. Fantastic. Well, Alyssa, Well, thank you so much. If people wanna learn more about you and Aries and Assail, where can they go to do that? Sure, yeah, assailai.com. So it's A-S-S-A-I-L-A-I.com. And also on LinkedIn, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm also on Twitter/X and all nothing but food photos on my Instagram, so I wouldn't recommend that. All I do is take pictures of my meals. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been really fun. I'm already looking forward to the follow-up. Episodes. Thank you. Thanks for having me. 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