Episode 129 – Oliver Sild

Introducing Oliver Sild

Oliver is a 26-year-old entrepreneur who has built three companies today and is very active in the cybersecurity landscape. WordPress folks would know him as the founder of a website security company called WebARX.

Show Notes

Twitter |@OliverSild

Company Website | webarxsecurity.com

Company Twitter | @webarx_security

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 129.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Oliver Sild. Oliver is a 26-year-old entrepreneur who has built three companies today and is very active in the cybersecurity landscape. WordPress folks would know him as the founder of a website security company called WebARX. Hey, Oliver, welcome.

Oliver: Hello, there.

Tara: Hi, Oliver. Welcome. It’s nice to meet you. And thanks for joining us on Hallway Chats today. Would you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Oliver: Sure. First of all, thanks for inviting me. I’m very happy to be here. I’m a 26-year-old entrepreneur. I’ve actually been into cybersecurity from very early stages or very early ages. I got into it when I was I think 14 or 15. It happens to be in a way that in many cases, people get into cybersecurity from gaming. So that’s really how it happened with me as well. But eventually, I started to found a company that was mainly working on web development. That’s how I got into WordPress. Before that, I was working with Joomla, Drupal, other content management systems.

Over the course of managing businesses and doing web development and most of technical stuff, I also created a co-working space, which of course right now is closed, but yeah, it was an interesting experience. And now for the past four or five years, really, I’ve been completely focusing on website security, and especially the security that includes components within your websites. So WordPress, people would understand that this, for example, means plugins themes – anything that you plug into your websites.

Tara: Where are you located?

Oliver: I’m in Estonia. I’m traveling a lot. But I’ve been moving back and forth from London. Right now I’m in Estonia at home. But mainly in Estonia.

Tara: Is there a large WordPress community there where you are in Estonia?

Oliver: I wouldn’t say that there’s a large community in Estonia, but there’s a large community in Nordics in general. Finland is with a very active kind of community for WordPress. But in general, Europe isn’t that kind of big. In most of the cases you still kind of communicate with community all over the Europe. WordCamp Europe was last summer. So a lot of people went there all over Europe. So not so much happening in Estonia. We are actually organizing WordPress meetups under our co-working space. So we have been doing them for I think three times this year. Still I wouldn’t call it a big community, but it’s its existence kind of.

Liam: Is that something you’re looking to transition to an online meetup in light of everything that we’re seeing in the world right now?

Oliver: We’ve been actually doing coffee mornings because the people who would usually be in the co-working space, obviously can’t be there because of what is going on in the world right now. But we’ve been kind of finding a way how to still stay in touch, and understand how everyone is doing and so forth.