George Kurtz, CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, discusses the current cyberthreat landscape and his strategy to drive innovation and lead in the cybersecurity space.
On the cyberthreat landscape: “It’s a rough zip code out there, as they say. You look at what’s going on in the environment, and we really break it down into, kind of three threat actor groups. You’ve got your nation-states. I mean, there’s a list of folks that are out there. You’ve got your e-crime, which is huge, and I’m sure there’s plenty of folks who have wandered their way into things like ransomware, or things like business email compromise, and wire transfer fraud … And then the third area is really hacktivism. And given what we’ve seen in the geopolitical environment, as you might imagine, there’s a lot of hacktivism going on.”
On the importance of adopting a client-centric mentality: “I’m going to go visit a hundred customers in a hundred days, right after the IPO. And literally that Monday, I went back on the road, and went really, around the world, a hundred days, one hundred and thirty customers. We overachieved and generated just probably a hundred million dollars of ARR in terms of pipeline and deals that we closed. So, why was that important? Because the IPO for me was really a starting point. It was the green flag, not the checkered flag. And I wanted to set the stage for the company. You know, it was like a big event, and you don’t want it to be a letdown. You want people to realize that now the hard work begins.”
This episode was recorded on October 12, 2022
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