Amjad Masad

We can't let you go.

Luckily, the president of the university was someone who was like really enlightened and saw the talent that I had.

And they could have easily derailed my life, you know, but I, you know, I explained like,

my reasoning for why I did this.

And he was understanding.

And he gave me at the time the Spider-Man line.

It's like, you have great talents, great power, but with power comes responsibility.

I was very sincere about it.

He said, we're going to let you go, but you're going to have to spend the summer working for the university trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues.

Um, and so I was like, that's no problem.

I would love to do that.

So I show up in the summer and the programmers there hate my guts because I hacked into their system and they wouldn't let me in.

Like I would go knock at the door where they work and I can see them and they wouldn't let me in.

Uh, so they didn't give me a chance to contribute and fix the system.

And by the way, everyone was cutting me slack.

I think all the professors just was worried I'm going to hack into their emails.

And so I had this like implicit power.

It was like notorious.

It was really cool as well.

I was getting recognition everywhere.