KURTZ
George

• 1. CrowdStrike

George Kurtz is the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike together with Dmitri Alperovitch. He is also an American racing driver. He was also the founder of Foundstone and chief technology officer of McAfee.

He authored Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions.

CrowdStrike

In November 2011, Kurtz joined private equity firm Warburg Pincus as an "entrepreneur-in-residence" and began working on his next project, CrowdStrike. He, Gregg Marston (former chief financial officer at Foundstone), and Dmitri Alperovitch co-founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California, formally announcing the company's launch in February 2012. Kurtz pitched the idea for the company to Warburg Pincus and secured $25 million in funding.

CrowdStrike shifted the focus from anti-malware and antivirus products (McAfee's approach to cybersecurity) to identifying the techniques used by hackers in order to spot incoming threats. The company also developed a "cloud-first" model in order to reduce the software load on customers' computers. CrowdStrike, now headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, attracted public interest in June 2016 for its role in investigating the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks, and in May 2017, the company exceeded a valuation of $1 billion. In 2019, CrowdStrike's $612 million initial public offering on the Nasdaq brought the company to a $6.6 billion valuation under Kurtz's leadership. In March 2020, when discussing company strategy at CrowdStrike, he stated "not one time have I regretted firing someone too fast." In July 2020, an IDC report named CrowdStrike as the fastest-growing endpoint security software vendor. He ranked on CRN's 2021 Top 100 Executives list. In 2024, he remained president and CEO of CrowdStrike.

In 2023, Kurtz warned of cyber threats from China and criticized Microsoft’s response after Chinese hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft's cloud email service to gain access to the email accounts of U.S. government employees.