I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. As a kid I was always into adventure and being innovative in all kinds of curious ways—like the time I put a spin on the classic lemonade stand and sold golf balls I found in a creek near our house back to golfers.
My path to technology wasn't as direct. I took a coding class in high school and wasn't sure I liked it, but then I watched this movie that fanned my interest in cybersecurity and ended up studying computer science. I started my career as a software developer but quickly pivoted into network security and became focused on protecting our nation’s critical infrastructure—the electricity, transportation, and underpinnings of our society.
These underpinnings are a rich target for adversaries. It felt like not enough was being done in that realm. When I started my first cybersecurity company, TCecure, I saw a recurring tension: Organizations wanted to make their systems more secure with updates, but they were nervous that any change might break something and disrupt operations. The default was often to delay updates until there was clarity, which could take a long time.
I created CyDeploy to relieve that tension and give organizations the confidence to make security changes sooner. Our technology starts with a basic tenet: You can't secure what you can't see. We provide a full inventory of a company’s devices and applications, and from there, our machine learning observes a critical system to create automated test scripts reflecting its normal use. An organization can then run those scripts on a "digital twin," or copy, of their system. They can then apply the security change in that non-production environment and get a report showing what, if anything, will fail. This is critical for our primary customers in transportation, health, and education—sectors where system downtime is a huge problem.