The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kurtz calls competitor Cylance a one-trick pony, not a true platform
“A good example of that is silence. They shortcut it themselves to a better AV product, but they were one trick pony. They weren't a platform.”
Kurtz: Enterprise customers spent heavily on legacy antivirus but remained vulnerable
“People were spending a lot of money on Mac and semantic and others, and they were still being breached.”
George Kurtz: Cybersecurity platforms should focus on breach prevention, not malware
“Why focus on preventing malware, which is what most AV companies do? And why don't we focus on preventing a breach?”
Kurtz wishes he took loans to buy more early CrowdStrike equity
“I probably would have took out as many loans as I could have and put as much money of my own money in the deal as early as possible.”
Kurtz: Equal equity split among six co-founders failed at Foundstone
“The first company was like six partners, you know, we're all even, and that, that didn't work out so well. Some people did more work than others.”
CrowdStrike was the third fastest-growing enterprise software company to IPO
“I think we were the third fastest growth company to ever IPO behind like Zoom and Salesforce.”
Kurtz predicts CrowdStrike will mirror Salesforce's platform and revenue trajectory
“I think the next five years probably look a lot like, you know, Salesforce trajectory where you continue to build out your platform, you continue to scale your revenue, your annual recurring revenue, additional geographic expansion.”
Kurtz: Legacy security resembled Siebel instead of cloud-native Salesforce
“Everything to me looked like Siebel, and I thought it should look like Salesforce.”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike built early global remote workforce around top talent
“I focused on getting the top 20 people wherever they were in the world, and we didn't really care about having them in an office. And we really, I would say, pioneered a lot of, pioneered, maybe that's the wrong word, but we were ahead of the curve in terms of…”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike was the largest security company at IPO
“When we IPO'd, we were the largest security company at the time when we IPO'd.”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike committed to never selling perpetual licenses
“When I recruited my CFO, I said, hey, we'll never have a perpetual license, and he gave me a hug.”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike was unique in offering in-app platform trials
“Part of the secret sauce with CrowdStrike and selling is that the platform helps sell itself, and we've got in-app trials, nobody has that.”
CEOs must accept delegation once employee count surpasses personal knowledge
“At some point there, it's, you have to trust you got the right people, because you haven't interviewed them. You have to accept that you're not going to know everybody. You're not going to know their names.”
George Kurtz: Part ways immediately once you know an employee won't work out
“If you know the person is not going to work out, you know, you give them a hug and you part ways and you don't wait around.”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike raised $25M Series A from Warburg Pincus off 25 slides
“I became an entrepreneur in residence at Warburg Pincus, got basically crown track off the ground, and wrote 25 slides, got twenty-five million bucks.”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike ran public-company operational systems years before its IPO
“We looked like a public company when we were many years Still private. And we ran it that way. You know, okers, management systems, like measurement of everything.”
Kurtz met 100 global customers in 100 days post-CrowdStrike IPO
“On Monday, we're going to start the 100 by 100. We're taking one day off and we're doing the 100 by 100. He said, well, what is that? And I said, we're going to meet a hundred customers in a hundred days, wherever they are. I flew all over the world to meet a …”