YouSaid · the spoken record

George Kurtz

lines on the record: 34
first: 2021-10-14
most recent: 2021-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Think the next five years probably look a lot like Salesforce trajectory where you continue to build out your platform, you continue to scale your revenue, your annual occurring revenue, additional geographic expansion. And at the same time, we want to have fun, right? We want people to realize that we hear about this work-life balance. I think in today's day and age, it's more work-life integration. That's the reality of where we are today. We want people to enjoy the journey, to continue the mission.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just keep in touch with people, keeping in touch with them, and making sure that they're really invested in what they're doing, right? They may not see the results, you know, if you're just in your at-home working on a widget in the UI, you may not hear how excited the customer was for that or how that helped us win a big deal and that collaboration with other colleagues. You may not feel a sense of purpose if you're just isolated.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends on the team. Most teams probably get together and it changed over time because we got bigger, but a lot of teams will get together on a quarterly basis or max every six months. And some organizations are pretty big. But giving an example, up until COVID, we would actually, no matter where the person was hired, they could be in Australia, we would send them to California for one week of training. Didn't matter. Super expensive, but it worked because we really wanted to indoctrinate people into the culture, the history of crowdsrake, the culture, how we operate. And I think that served us well because when they're remote, they need to be thinking about the values that we have.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did, I think, what we focused on is let's get the right people wherever, let's force them to get together, because you really do have to force them to get together. And then let's get tools to allow them to collaborate. And we tried every tool, every video conferencing, I mean, everything. You know, Zoom seems like obvious now, but it wasn't around when we started the company. And I think that's actually worked out pretty well. And I would say maybe the missing element, though, when they're all remote is the community, right, where people have net forcing exercise where they got together allow them to work remotely for a period of time. And then, you know, once the well ran dry, they got together. They got recharged. And then they went back and then they got together again. So that's the missing element right now.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good one. I wish I knew that a pandemic was coming and I would have been able to sort of prepare the company even better to work remotely for the last two years.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think follow the process that I laid out, which is here are goals, here are our strategy, clear objectives, we're measuring. At some point, this is not a surprise, right? You're giving feedback throughout the process, and then you get to a point, which is like it really is. Hey, this is, you know, this is not working out. We're going to go in a different direction. As a person, I love you. And, you know, we're going to just part ways here. Do it in as humane way as you can, right? I mean, no one likes to do that. I don't like to do that, but you have to do that at some point. And I always try to help people land in other areas because they've added value in some capacity. They were here. But at the phase that we're at, you know, maybe they were great for the evangelical phase, but they've reached the ceiling in terms of scalability. And there's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't make them a bad, you know, person or a bad executive. Just means that, you know, we've got to move on to a different phase and a different person.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is one I really focused on. I've never regretted firing someone too early. Not my career. I've never regretted that. I've always regretted not letting someone go too late. I waited too long. So I think that's one of the areas. If you know the person is not going to work out, you know, you give them a hug and you part ways and you don't wait around.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you dig down, if you're focused on every detail it does, if you're focused on a few that stand out and you beat it like a dead horse, it doesn't because once you figure out what the problem was with that detail and you fix it, you've now added another 10th to the car.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest strength relentless and perseverance and ability to execute. Biggest weakness is I can focus on the minute detail and beat it like a dead horse until I figure out what's happening with it. And some of them I probably should have let go.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say good to great because it really focuses on how do you become great companies, not just mediocre, you know, how do you stand out from the pack?”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, you're always like, Well, how's that going to work out? Can I do that? But I come to the realization probably many years ago that I'd rather bet on myself than bet on other companies or maybe even other people because I've been in big companies, small companies. I've run two of them, but I've been in others that I worked for, got acquired or what have you. And for me, even if you're 80%, that's still pretty good in baseball, right? And I think directionally, you're going to make mistakes, but if you're moving in the right direction and you've got the right philosophy and you've got the right people, you know, they're going to turn out well for you. So that's really what I focused on. I really never had any doubts that CrowdStrike was going to be successful. I didn't realize it was going to be as successful as it has been and how big it is, which is really cool to undershoot a little bit, but I knew it was going to be a home run.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The roadshow going. I did that because I thought it was important to set the stage for not only for Wall Street, but for our company to say, hey, IPO is a green flag, not a checkered flag, right? So we got to keep going. And this is the way we're going to keep going. We're going to be out meeting customers.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think that starts from the top, and I'm a guy that hates losing. You know, you really got to push everybody because you can't after you become public, become complacent. And I think that's part of what I wanted to do after the roadshow. And maybe I'll tell you that the 100 by 100 story, because we met with an investor on the roadshow and he said, okay, so you guys are going to IPO. What are you going to do after that? You're going to go to Vegas. You're going to have a party? Like, what are you going to do? And he was like, you know, pretty to the point. He was, I think we were in New York or something. And I grew up on East Coast. So I think it was an East Coast guy. And I said, no. I said, we're going to keep the roadshow going. And what do you mean by that? I said, well, after we finish here, because we've been in, you know, 10 cities and 14 days or whatever, I said, we're going to meet with, I appealed on Thursday. I said on Monday, we're going to start the 100 by 100. It would take a one day off and we're doing the 100 by 100. He said, well, what is that? And I said, we're going to meet 100 customers in 100 days, wherever they are. I flew all over the world to meet 100 customers in 100 days. And I kept.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of them got it because they looked at a number and said, We haven't seen numbers like this. How can this be possible? So I think the numbers really speak for themselves. And then when you tell the story of it's simple story, Salesforce is security. What does that mean? You know, it means we have a platform. We sell modules on a subscription basis. We've got a massive market opportunity. Does anyone here in the room think security is not important? No? Okay. Who's your competition? What does it look like? I mean, you go through some basic stuff and you look at the proof points. So we didn't get into the weeds at all. It was really simple what we are, what we've done, and focus on what we want to do after we're a public company.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've enjoyed it. We built a company to really be a public company. We didn't want to sell it and thought it could be a foundational company. And I wanted to be around for a long time. So I thought the public route was the way to go. And I had sold my first company. And then McAvey got sold. So, I mean, I had done that and really wanted to be public. So I went through the roadshow. Actually had a heck of a lot of fun with our CFO Bert. You know, for all the companies that came out during COVID, they really kind of missed some of the fun of being out there and meeting with the investors and having a good time. So I enjoyed that process.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, I don't remember when it was, you don't know the name of every person in the company and you haven't touched in the hiring process every person in the company. I don't remember it was 100 or 500. I mean, it was or 1,000. You know, it was like it was probably in the hundreds. And at some point there, you have to trust you got the right people because you haven't interviewed them. You have to accept that you're not going to know everybody. You're not going to know their names. When you're going to meet new people and they're going to say, hey, I'm with CrowdStrike and you're going to go, okay, that's fantastic. I mean, I love meeting CrowdStrike. Tell me about you. Tell me about your family and, you know, have an interaction with them. But they're not the people that you sat down and worked through the night with. You know, that's an acceptance and a realization there's nothing wrong with it. It's just different than when you first get the company started.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like have a transaction relationship with your customers, but you have to have realize that it's a big machine that has a flywheel and you've got to not get in the way of it and you have to enable it. So we're still in the scaling phase, but you do have to change your leadership style a little bit. And as we talked about earlier, you've got to really be able to empower your people.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's multiple phases when you start a company. In the first phase, it's really evangelical leadership, but you've got to get the followers. You've got to convince people. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I had to convince husbands and wives to let their better halves join because we were going to be around and we're going to change the world. And we had this mission to do better things in security and help people. So when you don't have a product, you got a PowerPoint, right? You got to go out there and be evangelical and you got to lead people based upon where we're going. Once you have it, then it turns more into scaling then you've got to say, okay, well, we've got something great here. How do we scale this thing? And your leadership style needs to change a little bit because you got to start delegating things, right? You can't just, it's not all, I mean, I used to update the website, right? I mean, like, can't do that stuff. And then once you get through that and we're still in the scaling phase at some point, companies become, you know, more transactional. That's not an area. Transactions are great, but you don't want to be necessarily.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to go with the racing analogies through this podcast. I'll keep going on that theme. You know, I always say the windshield is 10 times bigger than your rear view mirrors, right? So you got to be looking out the windshield. You can't be driving in your mirrors. You got to be aware of the competition, right? You have to look back. You have to know what's happening, but you can't drive the car in your rearview mirrors. You got to look forward. So, you know, for us, we're certainly aware of the competition. We're the leaders. We got everybody trying to copy us and knock us off the hill. And, you know, you can't get wrapped around the axle of that if you put your head down, you innovate, and you execute, you're going to stay ahead. just like in the race, right? You can't compromise your line and you can't compromise what you're doing to try to react to a competitor. You got to be aware of them, got to be respectful of them. You got to realize that if you put a foot wrong, you could lose the race, but you shouldn't just focus on them and you need to run your own race.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it. I didn't have a doubt because I'd rather bet on myself than other companies and other people. Number one, and number two is I didn't have a doubt because I knew we weren't taking the shortcuts. We were taking the time to build it right. So when you look at over time, if someone had better financial performance, sure, they got something out before us. But we sat there and again with patient investors, we had the time to build the Salesforce of security. We spent a lot of time building the platform and not necessarily selling it. We're going to get it built. We got to make it work. We had to get data in. Then we had to train our AI models and we had to do prevention. It took a lot of time. And people shortcut it themselves. A good example of that is silence. They shortcut it themselves to a better AV product, but they were one trick pony. They weren't a platform. We thought we would win the long game and think that's playing out.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think if you basically start with on a quarterly basis, which a lot of companies run quarterly basis, what are the goals for this quarter? And then we're measuring them 90 days later. Either you made the goals or you didn't. So it's very direct feedback. Like what happened here? Was there a problem? Was there something that came up? You know, do we not have a clear plan? So there's a lot of questioning that goes into it. There's not a lot of yelling. It's just like, here's the scorecard. You know, like when the race is finished, your first or your last or somewhere in between. I mean, it's pretty easy. So if you can create those goals and those measurements very early, the conversation is it's forced at a minimum every 90 days. And for me, it's like every week or two because I'm looking at this stuff all the time, saying, well, where are we? You know, what's happening? How do we get this back on course? So I think you need to have direct and fast communication more than 90 days. But at the end of 90 days, you got the scorecard. And either you're making it or you're not.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done, then I can dive in, do deeper inspection, and get involved. So that's general philosophy in areas that I really like and need to help in. Obviously, sort of the product vision of where it's going, that's a big element. The sales element, sales starts at the top. We can talk about my 100 and a 100 after the IPO if you want. That was 100 days on the road with customers. And then the last piece of that is on the marketing and the messaging and the positioning side. So those are today's day and age. That's where I spend a lot of my time.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to empower your people. You've got to hire the right people. You got to empower them. I think it starts with setting a clear vision and goals. And I'm pretty focused. Obviously, I got the vision piece, started the company, and can explain what we want to do here, but also focused on operational excellence and execution. We spent a lot of time as a small company. I'll get to answering your question, but we spent a lot of time as a small company building out systems. We look like a public company when we were many years still private, and we ran it that way. systems like measurement of everything. And once you have that in place and that system in place and the instrumentation in place, then you can start to really delegate to people, right? So you hire the right people, you've got a clear vision, you've got clear goals, and you have the ability to measure, then you can start delegating. And for me, that was it. I would push stuff off to other people, let them run with it. And then, you know, have got dashboards and measurements. And either we're getting it done or we're not getting it done. And if we're not getting it done.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to my racing analogies. You know, you've got to spend the time up front to prepare the car. The car doesn't go fast just on race day. It goes fast two, three weeks, a month earlier when the thing is apart, when you're building it and rebuilding it, making sure that everything is right. So the thing for me is once the platform is built, if it's built the right way, we didn't take shortcuts. In some areas, I would laugh. I said, man, we got gold plated plumbing here. Like, why is this taking so long? And the architects that we have, you know, really smart people said, look, we've got to do it this way. It's going to fall over. It's not going to scale. you're going to appreciate it when we've got lots of customers on it and that worked so once you've built it the right way it didn't fall over and you had a great experience and it delivered value and then you can accelerate the sales process on top of it”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I think it stems from a philosophy of no waste, speed, and execution. I like to race cars. And you can't have a bunch of friction in the system. Like everything has to be perfect to go as fast as you can. And everything needs to be perfect to go as fast as you can to get the sales velocity. So for me, I hate friction. I hate anything that sort of gets in the way. So I kind of look at it and say, well, how do I consumerize the experience of CrowdStrike? In part, some of that is sales. And when you're selling to a big company, I mean, you got to go through the paperwork and the process and all. But part of the secret sauce with crowdsrike and selling is that the platform helps sell itself. And we've got in-app trials. Nobody has that in our space. We've got the ability to almost market to customers without, it's not like, hey, buy here or click now kind of a thing and looks like an ad. But once they get exposed to it, they want to buy more. They want to consume more. And it's very easy for them to do that.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it exceeded expectations when you think about crowd strike and when we IPO'd, we were the largest security company at the time when we IPO'd. I think we were the third fastest growth company to ever IPO behind like Zoom and Salesforce. You know, some crazy banker stats that are out there. And when I went through the process, I was like, I started naming a bunch of companies. I said, no, no, you guys were faster at scale than these guys. So I think that's incredibly powerful. Proud of it. We had a great team to be able to do that. And I think we built a great model. And I always talk about focusing as much on the business model and the scalability of the business model as I do on the technology. So we built a great technology platform, very scalable cloud architecture. But you need to build the flywheel of sales and you need to do that in a friction-free manner. And the platform needs to support it. Needs to be subscription-based. You know, we were really early on in the SaaS journey when I recruited my CFO. I said, hey, we'll never have a perpetual license. And he gave me a hug. So those are the kind of things that we built and that translates.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you got to look at it as what does it enable you to do and what experiences can you have? I mean, there's only so many things you can buy and those are fun, but I think it's about what experiences you can have and how money allows you to have those experiences and to share those with different people. You know, it's not just chasing money. And the thing for me is I've never chased money. I've chased an outcome of building a great company and having fun doing that. And, you know, the money came because we built great things and they were worth a lot of money, which is fine and that allows me some freedoms I didn't have before I started crowdstrike. But, you know, once you get to a certain point, it's like, what's your experience and how do you live life as opposed to I need another car or something else?”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably would have taken out as many loans as I could have and put as much money of my own money in the deal as early as possible. And I mean, I say that halfway, Jess, but I mean it. I mean, this was such a big deal. And starting on the company, you want to make sure that you've got dry powder, which I had. I mean, I had sold another company. But the amount of conviction I had, it would have been great to put some more money in early up front. And, you know, that's not a reflection of where we are today or the outcomes because it all worked out. But I think that why I say that is when you think about starting your company in entrepreneurship, if you have really great idea with a great team and more importantly, have high conviction, you know, the earlier you put your own money in, the more of it that you put your money in, the bigger the outcome is going to be at the end of the day. So, you know, there's a risk-reward factor that goes into it. So everybody needs to take that into consideration. But I think that's my one area where I would have bought a whole bunch of more prouts strike stock as early as I could have.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to make a statement and I wanted to make sure that I can get the right people. If you have 500K million bucks or whatever, I put some of my own money in as well.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least the ARAN was non standard. And then I'll tell you how it changed. So while I was selling Foundstone to McAfee, I'd been approached by Warburg Pincus, and they wanted to put $75 million into Foundstone. And I was in the middle of selling it. And we looked at it. And basically it would have been a platform company that they would have built on top of and acquired a bunch of other things. And we were too far down the path with McAfee. So they stayed in contact with me. And every year they'd say, hey, when do you want to do another deal? And seven years later, I said, hey, I got an idea. And they said, great. So I became an entrepreneur in residence at Warbur Pincus, got basically CrowdStrike off the ground and wrote 25 slides, got 25 million bucks. So the joke is I should have wrote 30 slides and a million bucks a slide. And that was it. That's how I got the company started. And Warbur Pink is rarely does very early seed rounds. I mean, they did BEA and they did us and maybe a couple others.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a good question. You're always going to have learnings every time you have a company of how to run it, what people to hire, and how to execute, operate. And first time that Found Stone, we didn't have as good an investors because I didn't have a track record of an entrepreneur. And I think that helped on the second one. So for me, it was how to set up the company, first company was like six partners. You know, we're all even, and that didn't work out so well. Some people did more work than others. And then the second one was really about let's get the right investors, let's get the right people from the beginning. And that's what I did at CrowdStrike. I focused on getting the top 20 people wherever they were in the world. And we didn't really care about having them in an office. And we really, I would say, pioneered a lot of pioneered, maybe that's the wrong word, but we were head of the curve in terms of work from anywhere because we picked the right people. So, you know, a lot of things of what not to do, a lot of things on, you know, what I would do differently in terms of fundraising and structuring the company and hiring people. I think once you have that foundation in place, that makes for...”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, it actually impacted my mindset because again, there was a bust in 2001, and I had to raise money in 2001. That was like the hardest time ever to raise money. Managed to get that done. But in 2000, obviously in 2007, you had the financial meltdown. So when we started the company, it was 2011. It wasn't all that far away. And for me, I think one of the biggest areas was to make sure that I had the right investors who were really focused on the long term, right? This was not, let's put a company together and get a single or a double. This was how do we hit grand slams because we thought the opportunity was so big and that's part of the reasons why I hooked up with Samirit Excel because they got the big vision and they were in it for the long term. They weren't just going to come one day and say, hey, we should sell the company when someone lobbed in an offer.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People were buying security and not buying the outcome they wanted. What I mean by that is if you think about all those big hacks that happened in 2010, advanced persistent threats they were called, people were spending a lot of money on MacVe and Symantec and others, and they were still being breached. So when I thought about what needed to be done, I just kind of tilted the idea a little bit on its side and said, well, why focus on preventing malware, which is what most AV companies do. And why don't we focus on preventing a breach? And it was those two concepts that I really put together and said, okay, I'm going to go out and basically build the Salesforce of security.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got to go back a little bit in time to get to that founding moment. So I had started a company called Foundstone in late 99, sold that to McAfee in 2004, and I spent seven years at McAfee. I didn't think I would make seven years there. And the last couple years I was asked to be the worldwide CTO. And I had turned it down twice. I was a GM, so I was a CEO that got acquired. So I was a general manager running a bunch of different things. And he said, hey, we want you to be the CTO. And I said, man, I don't want to be just a tech guy. So the third time, they said, hey, we're probably going to sell the company. Need your help. We'll just take the job for two years and you can do what you want after that. I said, okay, fine. So it was at that point that I inherited, right? Because I had built my own stuff that got acquired and then I had inherited product portfolio. I wasn't running engineering, but CTO over the company. And when I got in there, it was like, wow, everything to me looked like Siebel. And I thought it should look like Salesforce. You know, that was sort of the big aha moment where there's going to be an architectural shift to the cloud, number one. We need to do something. And number two is.”
2021-10-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source