Richard Bird
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Short · 51 words

Richard Bird is a cybersecurity executive, keynote speaker, and the author of three books: Famous With 12 People, and the forthcoming Built Wrong and The Verified Security Framework. He argues that cybersecurity keeps failing for structural reasons, not technical ones. He is passionate about making the digital world safer for everyone.

Medium · 109 words

Richard Bird is Chief Strategy and Chief Security Officer at Singulr AI. He has spent three decades inside the system he critiques, moving from executive roles in global banking and corporate technology into start-ups and public advocacy. He publishes The Hacker in a Hoodie Index, a live record of what cyber incidents actually cost, and is the author of three books: Famous With 12 People, the forthcoming Built Wrong: Why Cybersecurity Keeps Failing and How We Can Rebuild It, and its companion volume The Verified Security Framework. He speaks around the world to rooms that range from dinners with boards of directors to conference halls in front of thousands.

Long · 285 words

Richard Bird is Chief Strategy and Chief Security Officer at Singulr AI, and one of the most direct critics of the cybersecurity industry writing from inside it.

His vantage point is specific. Eleven years at JPMorgan Chase in executive director roles, including Global Head of Identity for the consumer banking businesses. C-level roles across established enterprises and early-stage companies. Hundreds of media quotes, interviews and presentations around the world. As he puts it: “The titles don’t make me right. What they bought was thirty years of watching the same failure show up in every business I worked in, no matter what industry it was in.”

He is the author of three books. Famous With 12 People (2024) is a career guide to becoming an internationally recognized expert in something nobody cares about. Nobody grants the title — the world and the market around you are what make you the expert. What that looks like in practice is micro-fame: known inside one field, anonymous everywhere else. Built Wrong: Why Cybersecurity Keeps Failing and How We Can Rebuild It argues that the security profession has spent three decades building narratives, measurements, and incentives that reward the appearance of protection over its performance. The Verified Security Framework is the operating manual for it, specifying the instruments that would measure protection rather than activity.

He publishes The Hacker in a Hoodie Index, a live public record of what individual cyber incidents actually cost, with every figure read from the document that reported it and graded by how well it is attested. The figures are never summed into a headline total, because a headline number conceals who truly carries the costs of a cybersecurity failure.

He lives in Denver, Colorado.

Photography

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Terms and conditions

Cleared
Editorial and news coverage, event programs, session listings, conference and podcast pages for an appearance he has agreed to, and coverage of the books. No permission needed and no email required.
Not cleared
Advertising or product marketing. Anything implying that he, or any employer of his, endorses a product, company, or service. Use as training data for a machine learning model. Resale or redistribution as stock. Altering a photograph beyond cropping and color correction. Editing a bio so that it says something he did not say — trimming for length is fine.
Rights
The photographs are from Richard's own archive and stay his. What is granted above is permission to use them for those purposes, not ownership. Credit “Courtesy of Richard Bird” where the format allows it.
Anything else
Ask first: info@richardbird.com. The answer is usually yes, and usually quick.

Name & title

Full name
Richard William Bird
Byline
Richard Bird
Title
Chief Strategy and Chief Security Officer
Organization
Singulr AI
Based in
Denver, Colorado
Books
Famous With 12 People (2024) · Built Wrong (coming October 2026) · The Verified Security Framework (coming soon)
Also publishes
The Hacker in a Hoodie Index