GEORGE KURTZ

Kurtz started out as an accountant. Seriously.

He passed the CPA exam, got bored, and taught himself security by breaking into things. In the late 1990s he co-wrote Hacking Exposed, a book that taught a generation of defenders how attackers actually think.

In 1999 he founded Foundstone, a security firm. McAfee bought it in 2004 and made him chief technology officer.

He spent years inside the antivirus machine and grew to hate it. He thought the products were slow and always a step behind.

In 2012 he left to start CrowdStrike. The idea was to move security to the cloud and stop attackers in real time instead of scanning for known viruses after the fact.

CrowdStrike is the big one. Kurtz co-founded it in 2012 with Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston, backed by $25 million from Warburg Pincus.

It built a cloud platform called Falcon that watches every device in a company for signs of attack. CrowdStrike got famous in 2016 when it investigated the hack of the Democratic National Committee and pointed at Russian intelligence.

It went public in 2019 on the Nasdaq under the ticker CRWD and grew into one of the most valuable security companies on earth. Before all that there was Foundstone, the firm he sold to McAfee, where he served as CTO until he left to do it all again.

Kurtz thinks like an attacker, not an accountant, even though he trained as one. His whole approach rests on a simple belief.

You cannot stop every break-in, so the game is spotting the intruder fast and kicking them out before they do damage. He bet early and hard on the cloud when most security software still lived on individual machines.

That was the contrarian call that built CrowdStrike. As an operator he reinvests aggressively into growth.

He treats a security company like a race team. You are always tuning and always pushing, because the competition never stops.

CrowdStrike, full stop. Kurtz started it in 2012 with an idea most people thought was crazy, that you could do security better from the cloud.

At the 2019 IPO the company was valued around $6.7 billion. Within a few years it was worth far more than that as it became a default choice for big companies defending themselves.

He took a $25 million seed bet and turned it into one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world. The man wagered his whole career on antivirus being dead.

The market agreed with him.

On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike pushed a faulty software update. It crashed around 8.5 million Windows computers around the world.

Airlines grounded flights. Hospitals delayed surgeries.

Banks and TV stations went dark. It became the largest IT outage in history, and it came from the company built to prevent exactly this kind of chaos.

CrowdStrike stock fell hard and tens of billions in value vanished. Kurtz apologized publicly and the company faced a congressional hearing.

The lesson was brutal and simple. When you sit inside millions of critical machines, you do not get to have a bad day.

Kurtz runs on conviction and speed. His core line is that you do not have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem.

In plain English, the threat is a person trying to get in, not just a virus floating around. So you build to outrun the human attacker.

He believes in betting everything on one clear idea and then moving faster than anyone else can copy it. He wanted to build what he called the Salesforce of security, one cloud platform that does it all.

Pick the right architecture early, he argues, because you cannot bolt the cloud onto old software later.

Kurtz keeps his personal life fairly private. He grew up in New Jersey and trained as an accountant before security pulled him in.

Outside the office he is best known not for family headlines but for his racing. He has competed in hundreds of races and treats it as a serious second pursuit, not a billionaire's photo op.

The racing is the clearest public window into who he is. He likes going fast, he likes winning, and he is willing to put his own body in the car to do it.

Kurtz earned a degree in accounting from Seton Hall University in New Jersey and became a certified public accountant. Then he walked away from numbers and taught himself computer security, mostly by hacking into systems to understand how they broke.

The accounting background was not wasted. It gave him the discipline to run a real business, not just write code.

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