George Kurtz
Co-founder & CEO, CrowdStrike. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorathlete@george_kurtz ↗LinkedIn ↗georgekurtz.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Kurtz co-founded the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike in 2011 after founding Foundstone and serving as worldwide Chief Technology Officer at McAfee. He co-authored the influential cybersecurity book Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions and also races competitively as an FIA Bronze-rated driver.
2shows
2appearances
36statements
12resolved
9supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
52said about them ↓ Everything George Kurtz said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kurtz: China directly hands stolen US trade secrets to its domestic companies
“The big thing with China is, there's a commercial aspect to what they do. So if the government breaks in and steals a trade secret from some company in the U.S., they'll just give it to another company in China.”
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: Hackers are deploying prompt-only autonomous malware that interacts with LLMs
“What we're seeing now is prompt only autonomous malware, meaning I can drop the prompt on your computer by a variety of means, and then it will autonomously interact with an LLM, and it will give a unique fingerprint every time it runs.”
Kurtz: Modern AI cyber threats can run autonomously without phoning home
“Now these can run autonomously whatever, without ever phoning home.”
Kurtz: All software contains unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities
“There are zero days in all software”
Kurtz: Two AI agents collaborated to bypass enterprise administrative security guardrails
“These two agents are reasoning and they went right around The guardrails that were put in place.”
Kurtz predicts each corporate employee will eventually control 90 AI agents
“On average, each employee is going to have about 90 agents they control.”
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: LLMs empower less-skilled hackers to execute nation-state level cyberattacks
“You're minting new adversaries because you don't have to have all the knowledge that you had to have in the past. You can ask any number of LLMs and you can get answers back. So what's happened is the attack timeline has been compressed. You can automate all o…”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike uncovered hundreds of North Korean operatives working as US engineers
“Well, it, it's hard to find these guys, but any event we found 40 of them. We were right. 40 of them. That, that's for the first run. We found hundreds now over.”
Kurtz: Nation-state hackers will always break into a target phone if determined
“If you look at the nation states and some of the creative ways they can actually get into a phone, as an example, if they want to get in bad enough, they're going to get in.”
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: Top companies embed cybersecurity personnel in HR to filter AI resumes
“So, what we're seeing now is the best companies are actually embedding a security person in the HR group, where they're pre-filtering all these resumes, because the resumes are AI generated, the LinkedIn profiles are AI generated, so you want to catch them up …”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike has never operated or generated revenue in China
“We don't have operations there. We don't have any revenue. We don't sell them to China. Never have. From the start of the company.”
Kurtz: Help desk speed incentives create major cybersecurity vulnerabilities
“So their whole job is to open a ticket, solve a problem, close a ticket. So if you follow the money and the incentives, you can see why there's a problem and people want to be helpful at the help desk and hence they get into the situation.”
Kurtz: The web browser is the primary front door for cyber adversaries
“So it's the front door now for how people work and how adversaries get in us through the browser.”
Kurtz: CrowdStrike uses internal SLMs and guardrails when leveraging LLMs
“We, well, we have our small language models, and we do work with just about all of the large language models. But we've built our own guardrails around what gets shared, how it gets shared, and how we process any of the data back.”
Kurtz: Companies shouldn't try to replicate billions in frontier AI R&D
“For other bigger, you know, frontier type models, I mean, you're not going to replicate billions in R and D you want to leverage what's out there and take the best of it.”
Kurtz: Rising geopolitical tensions consistently drive increased cybersecurity activity
“Whenever you see the geopolitical tensions go up, there's always more security activity”
Kurtz: Trump administration takes platform-focused, business-first cybersecurity approach
“When you think about what the administration is doing with security, they're taking a business first approach. You know what that means? They want to save money. They want to consolidate. They want platforms. They want better outcomes. Right. And they don't wa…”
The other half of the tape: George Kurtz's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 51 times in 8 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 23Sameer Gandhi 4Jason Lemkin 3Jason Calacanis 3Shardul Shah 1Saam Motamedi 1Miles Clements 1
Statements about George Kurtz, by other people (1)
Accel told CrowdStrike founder George Kurtz to shop their term sheet
“Why don't you take my offer, my term sheet, you have it in your back pocket. So when you have these other conversations, Go in knowing that your deal done already, and if someone comes along and offers you something much better, or you think they're additive t…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 48
All-In 3
2026 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- OpenAI Misses Targets, Codex vs Claude, Elon vs Sam Trial, Big Hyperscaler Beats, Peptide Craze
- "Cursor is Dead" is Total BS: Here is Why | Miles Clements · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Citrini Research Breakdown: Agents, "Ghost GDP", Consumer Spend | Figma Earnings Beat · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2024 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Jason Lemkin: Crowdstrike, WTF Happens From Here? Wiz Rejects Google’s $23BN Acquisition Offer|E1181 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Shardul Shah: How Index Makes Decisions & Why Benchmarks & Averages in VC are BS | E1202 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Saam Motamedi: Why Series B Won’t Make Money & Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | E1177 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2021 42 mentions in 2 episodes 21 per episode
- 20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To
- 20VC: Chris Sacca on Coming Out of Retirement To Unf**k The Planet with Lowercarbon, How Chris Evaluates His Relationship To Money Today, Why We Have Bred a Generation of Ass**** Kids, Do VCs Provide Any Real Value and The True Unfiltered Opinion on Faceb
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens George's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, CrowdStrike | 1 | 18 | 75% 6/8 | full record on 20VC → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, CrowdStrike | 1 | 18 | 75% 3/4 | full record on All-In → |