22. George Kurtz
Founder and CEO, CrowdStrike – 2012-present
While some panellists who picked George Kurtz did so before the CrowdStrike-induced mega outage on 18 July, it speaks volumes that one got back in touch with IT Channel Oxygen afterwards to stress their “opinion has not changed”.
Having founded CrowdStrike in 2012, Kurtz has built the next-generation endpoint security specialist into the world’s second most valuable cybersecurity company, behind only Palo Alto Networks.
Four of the channel leaders IT Channel Oxygen approached had the former McAfee exec on their card, with one placing him top.
Leadership style
With an apparent obsession with putting customers first, Kurtz visited 100 customers in 100 days following CrowdStrike’s 2019 IPO. “He’s the most intense, focused and driven person in the company,” Sameer Gandhi, a partner at Accel, a venture capital firm that first invested in CrowdStrike in 2013, reportedly said.
Despite concerns about the damage it could inflict on CrowdStrike’s brand, Kurtz has been praised for leading from the front following the incident, which impacted 8.5m Windows PCs (see his frank apology on NBC News, below).
Low points
If being at the epicentre of what was labelled the world’s biggest ever outage isn’t a tricky moment, we don’t know what is.
Killer quote
“I did that [visited 100 customers in 100 days] because I thought it was important to set the stage not only for Wall Street, but for our company to say, hey, IPO is a green flag, not a checkered flag.” (see here for more)
What our panellists said about Kurtz
Robert Pooley, Solutions Director & Co-Founder, Saepio Information Security
“[I nominate] George Kurtz for building and running one of the fastest growing cybersecurity vendors out there, all the while topping podiums as a ProAm race car driver at world renowned events like Le Mans 24hrs. Even in the face of the world’s biggest IT outage, his role as leader in a well-coordinated response process has been commendable.”
Larry Walsh, CEO and Chief Analyst, Channelnomics
“Everyone thought the Symantec-McAfee security dominance would never end. Then came CrowdStrike; George Kurtz took a vision for infusing AI into security and upended the endpoint security paradigm. He’s created one of the best companies on the market.”
How did IT Channel Oxygen compile The Century’s Greatest Vendor Leaders? See here
21 leaders were scored higher by our channel panel. See next page for more…
