Dmitri Alperovitch: Building CrowdStrike and defending against nation states

05/03/24 • 58 min

There are plenty of great startups solving impactful problems in security. Very few, however, ever grow to achieve the scale of CrowdStrike - a company that has rightfully become a household name in the industry. Today, CrowdStrike has a market cap of over $70 billion, making it one of the world's 300 most valuable companies. In the inaugural episode of ‘Inside the Network,’ we sit down with Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, to discuss his journey before, during, and after building this iconic company.

Dmitri walks us through his childhood, immigrating from Russia to the US, and the early days of his entrepreneurship journey. He then opens up about some of the hard decisions CrowdStrike had to make to win. He goes on to share his approach to investing in startups today, and what he looks for when evaluating founders and markets.

In addition to investing and supporting founders, Dmitri has also started the policy think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and written a new book - 'World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century'. In the last part of the episode, he discusses the threat China’s current ruling party poses, why US citizens should care about what happens between China and Taiwan, and how to ensure that the US remains the world’s leading power for decades and centuries to come.

Next Episode

Ron Gula: Bootstrapping Tenable to $100M revenue and becoming an influencer

Few cybersecurity companies have been able to bootstrap their way to success – Tenable stands above the rest in this category. The company raised its first round of funding after 10 years of operations. It had $90M of revenue at the time. In the venture world, “Tenable was the best cybersecurity business that nobody had ever heard of.” Today, it is the leading cyber exposure and vulnerability management company with $800M in revenue and over 44,000 customers globally.

In our second episode of ‘Inside the Network’ we sit down with Ron Gula, co-founder and former CEO of Tenable. We learn about his early beginnings and love for fighter jets and UFOs. We dive into his three successful startup journeys, including his most recent run building Tenable over 14 years. And we talk about lessons learned from his investing career at Gula Tech Adventures with over $100M invested in 50+ startups.

After their successful entrepreneurial journey, Ron and his wife Cyndi’s work has continued with Gula Tech Foundation, working to make the cybersecurity sector more diverse and inclusive. Finally, we touch on Ron’s new-found passion as a YouTube influencer – the Joe Rogan of cybersecurity has now garnered over 150K subscribers!