George Kurtz

George Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011 with Dmitri Alperovitch, bringing deep cybersecurity expertise from his tenure as CTO of McAfee and his earlier career as a security consultant and author. Born in 1970, he co-authored "Hacking Exposed," one of the most influential cybersecurity books ever published, which sold over 600,000 copies. CrowdStrike's foundational insight was that legacy antivirus software — signature-based, running heavy agents on endpoints — was fundamentally broken. Kurtz built the Falcon platform as a cloud-native, AI-powered security solution that uses a single lightweight agent to protect endpoints while processing threat intelligence in the cloud. This architecture allowed CrowdStrike to detect novel threats in real-time, something traditional vendors couldn't match. The company grew explosively, going public in 2019 and surpassing $3 billion in annual recurring revenue. CrowdStrike expanded from endpoint detection and response (EDR) into a full cybersecurity platform covering identity protection, cloud security, log management (acquiring Humio/LogScale), and exposure management. Its threat intelligence unit gained fame for attributing Russian state-sponsored hacking, including the DNC breach in 2016. On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike faced its worst crisis: a faulty Falcon sensor configuration update caused approximately 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide to crash with blue screen errors. Airlines grounded flights, hospitals cancelled surgeries, and banks went offline. Kurtz took responsibility publicly and implemented sweeping changes to the update deployment process. The incident became a case study in the systemic risk of security monocultures — the very dominance that made CrowdStrike successful made its failure catastrophic. Kurtz's leadership through this crisis and his ability to retain customers will define whether the incident was a speed bump or a permanent brand scar.