Cybersecurity Together: Unlocking the Power of Community
Hugh Thompson
RSA Conference 2025 · Day 2 · West Stage
Hugh Thompson opened RSA Conference 2025 by making the case that community — not any single technology or vendor — is the security industry's deepest competitive advantage. Drawing on a statistician's framework for reasoning under uncertainty, he challenged the 44,000-person audience to approach the week with a Bayesian mindset: stay open to changing your priors, seek out unfamiliar perspectives, and treat every hallway conversation as a data point worth incorporating. The conference itself, he announced, is evolving into a year-round platform. ---
AI review
Hugh Thompson opens RSA by celebrating the conference's own scale and encouraging people to network — with a Bayesian statistics metaphor stapled on for intellectual texture. The Cybersecurity Atlas is genuinely the most useful data point here, but it's buried under twenty minutes of motivational speaking. A conference chairman talking about why you should come to the conference is not a keynote.