The Decibel Podcast: Founders Helping Founders

Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder and Former CTO of Crowdstrike: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Episode Summary

Dmitri Alperovitch is the Co-Founder and former CTO of Crowdstrike, one of the most valuable cybersecurity companies founded in the modern era that defined the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Dmitri on why email security was one of the best places to learn cybersecurity, the hardest parts of finding product-market fit in a new category, and how all of his learnings inside of larger companies ultimately inspired him to start Crowdstrike.

Episode Notes

Dmitri Alperovitch is the Co-Founder and former CTO of Crowdstrike, one of the most valuable cybersecurity companies founded in the modern era that defined the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Dmitri on why email security was one of the best places to learn cybersecurity, the hardest parts of finding product-market fit in a new category, and how all of his learnings inside of larger companies ultimately inspired him to start Crowdstrike:

• Why E-Mail Security Was the Best Place to Learn About Adversaries  [7:15 - 14:32] - Dmitri’s early career at CipherTrust put him on the front lines of stopping email spam. This was a rapidly changing field that taught him that adversaries could make changes in hours, not days or weeks. This mindset taught him that there are no silver bullets and that our defenses must always adapt quickly to ever changing threats.
• Building a Services and Software Company Together to Own the Category  [33:53 - 39:34]  - In the early days of Crowdstrike, the team built an elite services team that gave them insight into how nation state adversaries were breaching customers. This gave them unique lead generation and IP that helped them build their endpoint security solution which ultimately became the category leader in EDR.
• How Targeting Existing Budgets Unlocked Revenue Growth [39:35 - 45:15] - Crowdstrike early on complemented existing AV solutions with an advanced EDR and IR offering, primarily targeting companies who understood nation state attacks. Their revenue growth accelerated when they offered to replace traditional anti-virus and could access existing budgets for endpoint security. This move ultimately gave them a much larger TAM leading up to their IPO.