How a teenager with a laptop became a nation-state threat

A teenager with a laptop can now execute cyberattacks that only nation-states could pull off four years ago. While AI systems are trained to say "yes" and placate users, they're simultaneously being weaponized for spam, phishing, and creating non-consensual intimate imagery.

Glen Wise, former Meta threat intelligence engineer turned entrepreneur, recognized this paradox early. His startup Cinder has become the "club bouncer for the internet," helping platforms enforce safety rules across millions of users. In just a few years, they've raised $14 million and processed over 100,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In this interview, Wise reveals how his 9/11-shaped worldview led him from government counterterrorism to Facebook's red team, why he nearly abandoned his startup idea due to imposter syndrome, and how they pivoted from a failed threat intelligence platform to a $14M trust and safety operation that's racing to keep innovation ahead of regulation.

Glen: Growing up in New Jersey, being 6 or 7 years old during 9/11, that was such an impactful moment in my life and my community. When you grow up with that in the backdrop, any opportunity to be part of a greater mission was really important to me.

So when I went to college and I realized that you can actually go work at the NSA or the CIA, the FBI on these exact issues of making sure that never happens again, that's the only thing I wanted to do. That inevitably led me to join government, being able to work on counterterrorism issues, which inevitably led to me doing the same type of work at Facebook on a threat intelligence team.

Glen: Facebook started investing heavily in threat intelligence before the harm became prevalent on the platform. Being on a red team, I think is one of the most fun jobs that someone could have because you get to try to break things.

This is something that I instill on my team today - how do you have that adversarial mindset? There's gonna be people on the other side trying to stop you and you have to acknowledge that and be able to think like that.

Glen: At the time, I was talking to so many other companies that were really struggling with getting a grasp on the abuse occurring on their platform, and so I thought that this would be a really interesting thing to start. I was thinking about it for a long time to the point where it's all I thought about outside of work.

Part of my hesitation of founding Cinder was that I just thought I wasn't ready. I felt I didn't have the right experience. My initial thought was to go to a smaller company and help them build a platform internally. So I ended up reaching out to a bunch of people and I realized that there were a lot of companies to choose from.

To build something internally - at that point, you should just build it centrally and then give it to all these companies. It just made so much sense as a business.

Glen: I applied to Y Combinator thinking that nothing would happen, literally an hour or two before the deadline was due. I ended up getting a call from Michael Seibel and Michael told me that he thought the idea was great. He's really excited about it, he wants me to do it, but I need to find a co-founder.

I told him that there are people that I worked with at Facebook that I thought were really amazing people that I really wanted to work with, but it's going to be impossible for me to get them to leave Facebook and actually join me starting this.

Fast forward 3 months later, I had a really great team of people that I really respected, and it was amazing - I mean still is amazing - that I get to work with them every day. Bringing all these people on and working with them was a really special moment for me.

Glen: This year alone with Cinder, our customers have submitted over 100,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and that alone is a pretty insane number, but it's also just scratching the surface of all of the really bad things.

We see abuse today that 4 years ago, only a nation state could do, and today a teenager with a laptop is able to do it. As a society, we need systems that can combat this abuse before it turns into a total hellscape.

Glen: When we set out to build Cinder, we knew that we were going to build a platform, and that is really challenging. I would encourage anyone to not build a platform from the beginning, because you have to build so many things on top of it in order for it just to work.

We set out to build what was effectively a threat intel platform for trust and safety, and we thought this was a great idea because we saw that pain in previous jobs. So we spent all this time building this platform and then we went out to show people and they effectively told us that this is interesting, but they did not want it. What they really needed was a way to handle their overall operations.

That's like a huge learning for us - really focusing on what the core customer problem is and get that problem down really tight and then go out and build.

Glen: There are way too many things to review and prioritizing is really difficult because everything is hard. Everything is hurting someone else and that burnout is real and you see people burning out in the industry all the time because they almost feel like they're facing an uphill battle.

Our team definitely sees some of that, but for us, everyone in our company is deeply motivated by the mission and everyone wants to inevitably have a world where the internet and innovation is safe and can be used by anyone.

When you hear stories from our teams of something that we took down or something that we helped stop or an abuse that we caught, that allows us to go on and be really motivated for the next day. You can easily get bogged down in the harm, but knowing that there's a path to being able to combat it and someone needs to combat it - if it's not us then who else is that gonna be?