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Short · 62 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 and economic reasons, not technical ones: no amount of better technology fixes a model that pays for effort while the bad guys get paid for results.
Medium · 144 words
Richard Bird is Principal AI & Identity Officer at Cyera, and an advisor to Singulr AI, where he was Chief Strategy and Chief Security Officer. He has spent three decades inside the system he critiques, and came to security the way the discipline itself did, out of technology operations: a CIO before he was ever a CISO, then C-level roles in security, product, and operations across global banking, established enterprises, and start-ups. 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 · 346 words
Richard Bird is Principal AI & Identity Officer at Cyera, 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, most recently Chief Strategy and Chief Security Officer at Singulr AI, where he continues as an advisor. 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.”
Built Wrong required all of it. The argument only holds if you have run the operations, answered for the incident, signed the checks, and sold the product, and very few have professionally survived all four.
He is the author of three books. Famous With 12 People (2024) is a career guide built on the argument that every profession needs someone willing to say what it will not say about itself. Nobody grants the title of expert; the world and the market around you are what make you one, and 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 is him saying it about his own, cybersecurity: three decades of 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.
Endorsements for Built Wrong
Quote any of these in full or in part, with the name and title as given. They are cover endorsements for the book, published 20 October 2026.
I was one of the lucky ones who got to read the early drafts of Richard's book "Built Wrong." I've had the privilege of getting to know Richard well over the years, and what I've always admired about him is his fearlessness and his unflinching commitment to truth. "Built Wrong" is a book filled with uncomfortable truths. I'm sure that it will anger quite a few people, but hopefully it will open the eyes of even more.
John KindervagCreator of Zero Trust
For many decades, cybersecurity leadership has been trapped in a repeating cycle of recycled conversations and bad investments, leading to a net-negative security posture. The core of this failure is a strategic misalignment: CISOs continue to operate as cost centers, making technology investments without connecting them to business outcomes. The adversaries are operating with a business mindset, which is the lesson leadership needs to internalize. We are losing because we are playing the wrong game. The recommended path forward is to adopt a new operational model, as articulated by Richard Bird in the very book you are holding in your hands, which promises to link cyber investment to concrete security results and break this decades-long stagnation.
Jeffrey WheatmanCyber Risk Leader and Former Gartner Analyst
Cybersecurity is the only industry of its size that renamed its defects and called it progress. Richard Bird spent three decades inside the machine watching organizations do everything the system asked of them and still lose. Built Wrong applies systems dynamics thinking that MIT has used for sixty years to explain why well-run organizations unintentionally produce disaster: a self-reinforcing loop where a broken narrative picks the wrong metric, the wrong metric rewards the wrong incentive, and the wrong incentive builds architecture that satisfies the metric instead of stopping the attack. Spending more money without touching the flawed logic within the loop just feeds it. Bird names the flaw and then shows us how to clearly solve it.
Dutch SchwartzAI Security thought-leader and 2x LinkedIn Top Voice
Richard has done the hard thing; he has put into succinct words what seasoned identity professionals know in their bones. He does so without assigning blame or victimization. And most importantly, he shows us a path forward.
Ian GlazerFounder, IDPro and President, Weave Identity
I have run global identity at the scale this book describes, and Richard is not exaggerating. He says out loud what most of the industry pays consultants to avoid: the model is built wrong, we mistook activity for impact, and we still fund identity like a discretionary line item. If you own, fund, or answer for enterprise identity, this is not optional reading. You cannot govern the exposure until you understand it. Read it before your 3:47 a.m. alert does the explaining for you.
Steve ToutFounder / CEO, Identient and Author, CISO On The Razor's Edge
Awards
Given to him, not written by him. Quote the citation as it stands, with the title as the awarder gave it: several name an employer he has since left, and restating them with his current one would misquote the award.
“Richard Bird, CSO of Singulr AI, is redefining digital trust and identity for the AI-driven era.”
“Richard Bird serves as a thought leader on issues of identity ownership, data privacy, and new government regulations for protecting user identities.”
Photography
Cleared for event programs, session listings, and editorial use. Not for advertising or endorsement: see terms and conditions.
Download the whole kit →Every photograph below, all three bios as plain text, and the terms.
At the podium
The current one. Manhattan in hand, which is not a prop. Download
Keynote
Black t-shirt, tattoos, no tie. The other half. Download
Full length
Gray check suit, floral bow tie and matching pocket square. Download
Headshot, open collar
Navy jacket, white shirt, no tie. The most recent frame in the set. Download
Off duty
For anyone who wants the version that is not wearing a jacket. With Alfredo. Download
Suit and skull bow tie
Both halves in a single frame. Download
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
- Principal AI & Identity Officer
- Organization
- Cyera
- Based in
- Denver, Colorado
- Books
- Famous With 12 People (2024) · Built Wrong (coming October 20, 2026) · The Verified Security Framework (coming soon)
- Also publishes
- The Hacker in a Hoodie Index