The Founder Formula
Every passing moment, a tech startup disrupts life as it was. In humanity’s pursuit of faster, better, and higher capacity, fresh companies are tackling old problems and modern complexities, all while pushing the bounds of the future.
The Founder Formula brings you in—behind the curtains and inside the minds of executives at Start-ups that have traditionally only been found in Silicon Valley—and the Venture Capital Firms that fund them.
The Founder Formula
George Kurtz - Co-founder of CrowdStrike
George Kurtz is the President, Founder, & CEO of CrowdStrike, but his journey to the CEO of a $20B+ company isn’t one that a lot of people would expect.
On this episode of The Founder Formula, we sit down with George to discuss what nearly got him fired from PricewaterhouseCoopers, why his lack of collegiate tech background makes him a more effective tech CEO, how CrowdStrike had a remote work force model in place before COVID19 hit, and why the IPO is the green flag for a company, not the checkered flag.
Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.
The IPO was the green flag, not the checkered flag. And it was really the start, the beginning of the next chapter.
Todd Gallina:founder formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future-leaning startups each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast-paced and innovative tech firm they'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned created and scaled we hope you're ready let's get into the show Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Founder Formula. My name is Todd Galena, and with me today is Tony Olzak. He's the Chief Technical Officer here at Trace3. He's coming to us live from Colorado. Hey, Tony, how's it going? Doing awesome. Thanks for having me, Todd. Hey, Tony, one of the things that's been going on with COVID is I think a lot of people who may not have embraced a lot of the technology available to them have been forced to, and in some ways, It's changed things permanently. I've mentioned before on this podcast, my wife is a doctor of psychology. She used to have to go into an office to see her clients. That's now changed. She does it all from home using Zoom. You know, all of these things need to be certified by the board of psychology, but they have been. And so she's able to see actually more clients. So in some ways it's been great for her. Can you talk about maybe how the tech has improved a lot of people's lives during COVID? Yeah.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, sure. I think you nailed one, right? Video has dramatically changed. Some of our healthcare clients that we talked to, they've described just exponential uptick in telemedicine. So that has really taken off. I think people who even weren't comfortable with it before are seeing the light there. And I don't think a lot of that's going to go back. I think the convenience of being able to just use a video call and see your doctor or see a physician of some type or just any type of interaction that you want to have and just getting it immediately, we're seeing the benefits of that. We're seeing older organizations where they were pretty conservative, where they had everyone must be in the office. are realizing that working remotely can be very productive. And in fact, in many cases, our people are more productive working from home. If you think about the future though, what's really interesting is Where do you go next? And this is a big question that we've heard over and over again. And asynchronous communication or asynchronous video is something that we're seeing some really good interest in for the future. If you're not familiar with this concept, it'd be how do you video conference with somebody but not in real time? And so there is an app out there called Marco Polo that I've begun to use with my kids. And they reminded me that Marco Polo is Snapchat for old people, which is a kind of inside joke inside our house. But the concept is sound, which is you can't always schedule time with somebody. But video is definitely more intimate when you communicate with someone and you can make a better connection. So if you can't make sure that you can schedule and then be there in real time, and not everyone wants the pressure of having to do a video call in real time and to be sitting there all day doing that. Could you just do it in an asynchronous fashion where I record my little video, I shoot it to you, you at your leisure can look at that. take it in and then respond whenever you have availability. And we still get the chance to video with each other without the pressure of real time. And we think the future of healthcare, the future of enterprise communications is going to go down that path as well. And we're seeing an uptick in interest from the VC community to invest in those kinds of things as well. So really cool things happening on that front. That is
Todd Gallina:cool. We'll have to keep our eye on what comes out of the Silicon Valley as those companies mature, but I'm down with that. It seems like you can get more of a nuance on what people are saying. Obviously, you can read some emotion. I think that would be a huge benefit in communication for us. So, hey, man, you ready to bring on our guest? Love it. George is awesome. Can't wait. Okay. As promised, our guest is a serial entrepreneur and a leading expert on cybersecurity. He's the co-author of Hacking Exposed, Volume 6. And if you happen to be a CNBC fan, you'll see him there quite a bit. Most notably, though, he is the CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike. a cutting-edge security technology company focused on creating the world's leading next-generation endpoint platform delivered from the cloud. And I also might mention he's a terrific keynote speaker. Welcome to the show, George Kurtz. Hi, George. Hi, pleasure to be here. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for joining myself and Tony.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, hey, George. To kick us off, we'd love to hear a little bit about CrowdStrike and just why you founded the company.
George Kurtz:Sure. Thanks, Tony. So I guess it kind of goes back to maybe my first company and how I got to McAfee. And then I can tell you a little bit about the thought process in starting CrowdTrack. And I think that's always relevant for me and sort of I'm always curious as to when people start companies, what problem they saw and how they got going. So I had a company called found stone that I, I started sold that to McAfee in 2004, started late 99 and then spent about seven years at McAfee. And the last couple of years I was asked to be the worldwide CTO. And I actually had turned it down like two times. I didn't want to be just a tech guy. I was running a couple of different business units for him. And, and, um, just doing some interesting stuff. But they asked me to be the CTO. So I took the job and it turned out to be one of the best jobs I had originally turned down because it gave me a much better appreciation for how broken the security industry was in terms of its architecture and outcomes and people being breached. So the general thought process was it really needed to be a foundational security cloud. If you can have a sales cloud and an HR cloud and an ITSM cloud with ServiceNow and Workday and Salesforce. It should be a platform company, which is really pioneering the security cloud, which is what we focused on. So I saw what worked and what didn't work and thought it was a good time to start the company after Mac can be sold to Intel. That's how we got CrowdStrike on.
Todd Gallina:Perfect. And you guys have had just a ton of success. And I think we'll get to that. But let's rewind quite a bit and just go back to kind of your beginnings. What in your background made you think that you could be an entrepreneur and start a successful company?
George Kurtz:Well, it's interesting because By classical training, I don't have a technology background, although, you know, I wrote seven editions of a book on it. But, you know, that was all sort of after the fact, I guess. When I went to college, I went to college in the 80s, didn't want to be a mainframe programmer and got a business degree in accounting. So I started my career at Price Waterhouse. I did some work there. I got pretty bored of auditing, got enough time to get my CPA. And I was working on an engagement project. And basically at the time, maybe I'm dating myself, but it was 16 column and 10 keypads. And you had to take all these numbers out of reports and write them all down and foot it. And it was just like a total waste of time. So I wrote a program on the mainframe that extracted all this information out and dramatically cut the time and effort of the audit to get this grunt work done. And I was either going to get fired or promoted because I cut the billable hours. Yeah, yeah. The big risk. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I did, I caught the eye of the management consulting group and, you know, they drafted me into that. And then I was really like the fifth person in the security group. You know, we can talk more about that, but anyway, my, my original track was accounting, got into consulting, you know, took some other course at NYU, went through a whole bunch of training at Pricewaterhouse and really, you know, hit the ground running with, um, just technology and security. I was always a tech guy. I ran bulletin boards and programmed in high school and all kinds of stuff. So I knew how to do that. I just didn't want to do that in college. So when I started my first company, I think it was just me thinking I could do something different, saw a problem in the industry and the vulnerability assessment space and thought it could be done better. And I was a guy with a business background and the idea to kind of redefine that industry. And that's how I got going and started the company.
Todd Gallina:Did you, just real quick, I want to double click on one thing. Would you recommend the same path? For example, if someone is pretty technical, they're going into college, do you recommend they take a college path or potentially go business route and then pick up the technology later?
George Kurtz:You know, it's a good question. And a lot of things have changed since I was in college. I probably would say, you know, if you want to go technology route, you can go technology route and then you may want to follow it up with an MBA. Because I think one of the things that's missing, I mean, you can go the opposite way, but I think one of the areas that's missing is really technology leaders who really understand business and go to market and sales motions and things of that nature. So if you're more than just a programmer, and there's nothing wrong with just programming, we have lots of them and you have to do it. But if you want to get into management at some point, you have to perhaps be a little bit more well-rounded. And if you want to start a company, I mean, there's been plenty of programmers and technical people that started like a Bill Gates, et cetera. And some of those didn't even finish college, but they had a great head on their shoulders and they had a feel for business. So I think what I was able to do is just take a business degree and merge it with, I love technology and it came out the right way, but I think it's kind of individual preference, but nothing wrong with an MBA and a technology degree. And I think that sets you up if you really want to be a CEO somewhere.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, that's great advice. If you follow that course, you got acquired by McAfee, become the worldwide CTO there, gain experience seeing this at a very large level. And then when McAfee sells to Intel, you go and start CrowdStrike. And normally what we'd ask other founders would be, what was the hardest part about pitching to a VC and these kinds of things? But you took a little bit of a different path there. And I think it would be great to hear what your experience was like as a, as an executive in residence and how that defers and how you try to get something off the ground. What was that like?
George Kurtz:Yeah, it was, I mean, the reality was it was sort of a bounty of riches. It wasn't too hard to get that going. And I think that's, you know, getting the details of it, but that's one of the things when you, when you have a track record and make other people money, there's, there's new people who want you to make the money. So I had new, the, The Warburg Pincus guys, they wanted to actually put $75 million into CrowdStrike while I was selling it to McAfee, and that deal never came together. But they always wanted to do something with me, so they'd call me every year and say, hey, are you ready to do something? So I chatted with them while Intel was acquiring McAfee and said, hey, I got this idea. They said, great, come on over, write the business plan, and we'll fund the A round. And I'll never forget, it was 25 slides that... put together and uh we got 25 million so we got a million bucks a slide pretty good ratio you should have done 50 slides i know that's a joke i always say i should have done 30 slides but uh 50 i would have given away too much equity but 30 30 would have worked and that's how we got the company going you know so it was uh no and that's that's different from series a in found stone you know where i didn't have a track record and you know it was more beating the pavement and finding some folks that would believe in me and some of the others. But CrowdStrike, it really wasn't that bad. I put some of my own money in and had other angel friends that put money in. So we got it up and running pretty quickly.
Tony Olzak:That's great. So if you continue on with that journey, at what point do you pick your founding team to come along with you? And what was your mindset at that time? How did you decide who was going to go on this journey with you?
George Kurtz:Well... You know, I was just trying to create a balanced team of myself, another technology person, as well as somebody on the finance side who I've known. And, you know, just wanted to have kind of a more balanced team. And really, it turned out to be kind of a founding team of, you know, probably 15 people that were really, we call them launch employees. And those were the key people early on who were just critical in getting the company going. And that was a big part of the success is, you know, handpicking the first employees 15, 20 people. And interesting thing is we were doing work from anywhere long before it was fashionable because we didn't care where they were. We just wanted the best people to build that core foundation. And that's what got the company launched and it's a big part of our success.
Todd Gallina:Are you guys still geographically apart from one another?
George Kurtz:Yeah, we, as a company, we're still, even as a public company, we're still 70% basically work from home. And I say work from anywhere, not quite because in some areas you have to have, you know, the licenses and all that kind of stuff, different countries. But, you know, we wanted to basically have a foundational team that was experts in their areas. And we were able to do that with the first 15, 20 people and really handpick them. And then we created these clusters of offices where we would, you know, folks could go in the office or not, but it allowed for a remote workforce and an office space. Originally, I started the company in Orange County and then moved it to Sunnyvale. Once we were in Sunnyvale, that became the headquarters. It was a bit controversial when we started the company in the fact that our venture guys typically viewed a startup as you have to be all in California, in Silicon Valley, and you have to be working 24 by 7, and you have to be sleeping under the desk, and this remote workforce is not going to work. But what we did is we just took a page out of what I would believe is the most successful software development model ever, which is open source. And we said, look, if these groups of people can come together remotely and they could develop amazing software, why can't we do that? So we took a lot of their best practices and software technology and applied that and got CrowdTrack off the ground.
Todd Gallina:So it sounds like you guys didn't experience many speed bumps as a result of COVID. In some ways, you were already set up for it.
George Kurtz:We were. So I was, you know, again, I think we're ahead of the curve. It was something that was a bit controversial. Is that really going to work out? And the funny thing is, we actually, as a company, we were a public company. We never even had a sign on our headquarters, you know, because the office wasn't quite big enough. I knew the company, the CEO that actually had the building. I pleaded with them to give us signage. because they were kind of moving out and we got the sign and we were up and running. But if you think about that, that's sort of how decentralized we were and we just had these small pods. So it worked out. And I think this hybrid model in a pre, I should say in a post-COVID world is really going to be the model where you have pods of offices and people that can come and go as they see fit or just stay at home. And they're empowered with the tool sets and the cloud technology to make it all work.
Tony Olzak:George, you mentioned this pod concept of pods of offices with remote workforce. How important was it that you at least have a little bit of geographical relevance or gravity with some folks so that they can get together? I mean, how did you guys arrive at this structure?
George Kurtz:Well, I mean, you have to have an office. You have to have a headquarters. You have to have somewhere you call home where customers come. And what we did is we basically landed in places that we wanted to be in. So we landed in Southern California, where I was there at the time, and we Started the company there, but we actually got a lot of our cloud engineers from the gaming community, which is big in Orange County and LA. And you talk about people that have to know how to make something work at scale, like the back end of Call of Duty. Those were the guys and gals. And then we still have an office in Seattle area. And a lot of our early developers came out of Microsoft, a lot of early kernel developers. So that made sense. Silicon Valley obviously speaks for itself. And then we had offices in D.C. where we've done work on the government side and just places that made sense from a talent and a business perspective. And that's where we set up pods and then had people kind of attached to a pod. And even in the Bay Area, I mean, you can be in the Bay Area and be two hours away, one way on your commute, but you're still in the Bay Area, right? People don't want to go to Sunnyvale. They can if they want to, but generally they work from home and go in as they need to.
Todd Gallina:Well, you guys have a great footprint. But I wanted to rewind a little bit and talk about you got your founding team together. You got your geography set up. Tell us about landing your first customer. You start a company. You obviously are catering to customers. Can you share a gratifying story about this company that you launched and somebody coming up to you and praising you?
George Kurtz:Well, we launched a company and it was one where we were... It's kind of a funny story. You know, we were building the technology. So we were founded to, to basically redefine endpoint security. And that takes a while to build the platform out. So we were, uh, building our team up and we have a very robust Intel team. And, um, you know, they, they were basically gathering Intel for the product so that we can inject it into the product. And one of the guys actually got to run the Intel team, wrote a blog and, uh, He was getting ready to put it out and he was letting me read it. I mean, we're only a few people, so I was reading it, kind of approving it. And I said, hey, this is a great blog. I said, why don't you... We had written other blogs like this, and we got some inquiries from people that really liked our intelligence. So I said, why don't you, at the end of the blog, say if you're interested in buying the CrowdStrike intelligence feed, send an email to intel.crowdstrike.com. And he just looked at me, he's like, but we don't have an Intel at CrowdStrike.com email. We don't have an Intel at all, but let's figure out how many people want it. You know, it was our MVP test. So we put that out there and we were like barraged with people going, hey, I want to buy your Intel. So we got that. I said, okay, well, better build an Intel offering. So we went out and did that. And, you know, we were able to get that to market pretty quick because that really wasn't, you know, totally integrating the platform and things of that nature. We did consulting work and stuff, but that wasn't the main business. Main business was always what we do today. And endpoint just took a little bit of time to build that out and more time to sell it. So we were gathering feedback and doing these little mini MVPs and that's kind of how we get off the ground. And, you know, we had a lot of early customers, big customers that worked with us that we had known in the past and, you know, they were willing to take a flyer on us and I think it worked out well for them and us.
Tony Olzak:Yeah, that's great. So you get the first clients going, you've got the intelligence platform, the endpoint platform comes behind it. And you mentioned earlier that you had brought on some people from the gaming community who really understand how to scale back-end platforms. With that team in place, as you began to put people onto the platform, what was the hardest part about scaling? I mean, any specific challenges you guys had to overcome and any advice that you would give to others?
George Kurtz:Well, it's hard to find the right people, and it's hard to convince them to come to a startup that didn't really have anybody. We didn't know real customers, just a PowerPoint. In the early days, you have to build this stuff, and you have to convince a lot of wives and spouses that the thing's going to work out. So I think in the early days, you really have to have evangelical people that believe. And you're not going to get the folks that are just kind of looking at a big W-2 going, okay, I'm going to get paid a lot less and I want to take the risk. So we had to filter out the folks that could take the risk and operate in a more chaotic environment rather than folks that expected everything sort of ticked and tied for them because every day is like Bob Ross, right? You have a new canvas and Again, I might be dating myself, but Bob Rolfe was the guy on PBS drawing the little cloud. Happy trees. Of course. Happy trees, right? On the white canvas. His head was shaped like his favorite brush, you know? Exactly. He's like a chia pet, actually. Yeah. So, you know, you have to find folks that can Bob Ross it, right? It's possibilities or parameters, right? And we needed a lot of possibilities people and a lot less parameter people because, you know, the stuff we were doing, everybody was saying, hey, that's never going to work. I can't tell you how many people from acting semantically. That's stupid. It's never going to work. You guys are going to fail. They were laughing. They were doing all kinds of stuff. And it's like, you know, you just got to shrug that off and basically have the people that believe. And that's what we focused on and scaling the company. So you got to get the right people early on. before you move into more of a scaling mode.
Tony Olzak:Well, it sounds like you guys nailed the culture aspect of it. If you were to look back at that time and in developing a good culture, what would you say are the keys to doing that?
George Kurtz:I think the key is the fact that we really focused on the mission and purpose. When you look at who we were recruiting against, Google and Facebook and others, we certainly didn't have the cash and the stock was a hope and a dream as opposed to an RSU they knew they were going to get every year. What we wanted to do was to have people realize that we're making a difference, saving the world, saving our customers from the bad guys. We're not pulling out guns. We're not in law enforcement, but we are basically saving businesses from the bad guys. That was very exciting for folks. We had a We still have today, you know, big focus on mission and purpose. And when you emailed CrowdStrike and you wanted a job, you actually didn't email like jobs at, you emailed mission at CrowdStrike.com. So we wanted people to sign up for the mission. That was a big part of it.
Todd Gallina:That's cool. All right. So I don't know if you know this, but it's a bit of a celebration because CrowdStrike went public almost to the day one year ago. So congrats. Thank you. You're welcome. So many of the founders that we've had on the show definitely went the acquisition route. Maybe a larger company picked them up. Was it always your plan to go public?
George Kurtz:Well, when I start a company, I have a rule, which is I never really focus or build something for an outcome. I build something to make customers happy and delight them. And if you take care of the customer, everything else takes care of itself. So it was more about if we did the right thing and we had happy customers, we'd have optionality and we could sell or potentially go public. So that being said, it wasn't built to sell, it wasn't built to IPO. Now, when we got into this thing and we realized how big it could be and be the next ServiceNow or Workday or what have you, Then it became clear to me that I didn't want to sell the company. I had been involved in two sales, and I wasn't so happy about the thought of being acquired by somebody else that was bigger. You get a financial windfall, but you don't see your baby through to where it needs to be. We looked at Salesforce and ServiceNow and worked as really our comps, not Symantec, because we wanted it to be a cloud pillar, not AB 2.0. So that's why we focus on the IPO and the growth profile we had. I mean, when we IPO'd, we were, I think, the fastest growing at-scale SaaS company to ever IPO. I don't know what the stats are now, but that was last year. That was ahead of Salesforce and Workday and ServiceNow, which was, you know, I didn't realize that until we So we actually went through the banking process and they said, hey, have you looked at this chart? And we were ahead of everybody. So when you have that kind of success in a market which needs to be redefined and you had competitors that were falling apart, I think the clear option was, you know, to be able to IPO it. And the reality is, you know, I think from a shareholder perspective, it was, you know, I don't think I know it's a much better outcome to where we are today versus selling it for a fraction of what will work today. So... It was something that I thought wanted to build a company that would change security and be around even after me. And I think the best way to do that is to have a public entity that can stand on its own.
Todd Gallina:Yeah. I mean, just wildly successful. I'm sure the investors are thrilled. And many of your investors, obviously, are some of the early employees that were part of the company. And I had an experience in my past where similar situation. We had a company that we helped build. The company went public. I had to hold my stock for six months until I could sell it. And I just remember there was this sense around the office, like every time I walked by somebody's computer, they would have the stock ticker up. They were obsessed with what the company was trading at. And so where I'm headed with this is, does being publicly traded, did that change the culture in any way?
George Kurtz:I mean, I'm sure there's some changes somewhere, but the reality is, I focus people on The fact that the IPO was the green flag, not the checker flag. And it was really the start, the beginning of the next chapter. It wasn't party time. And in fact, one of the things that I got asked on the IPO Roadshow was, never forget this investor said, hey, we're going to IPO. We've seen other people do it. It's like a hangover. It's party time. What are you guys going to do that you're not going to just celebrate and everything goes to hell and a handbask? And I said, well, we're going to keep the Roadshow going. And they said, well, what do you mean? I said, we're going to go on a 100 by 100 customer roadshow. We've seen enough of the investors. Let's go talk to some customers and prospects. And after the roadshow, literally like the next week, we started a tour of myself and the head of sales and went all around the world. And we visited over 100 customers and prospects and generated a tremendous amount of pipeline. So I think that was a way to really set the stage and demonstrate to everybody else that this is not time to rest. It's really time to get going. And, you know, foster that, you know, we're in it to win. We just didn't get here and now we stop. We want to continue to win.
Todd Gallina:Super smart. Green flag, not the checkered flag. That's awesome.
Tony Olzak:Yeah. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You know, you mentioned earlier about how you really didn't see some of these other endpoint companies as your competition. And I mean... During that time, there was just an explosion of new security solutions that were coming out at the time. You mentioned that you really were more concerned around things like Salesforce, ServiceNow. How do you track your competition? And are there any concerns that map back into the business? How should founders think about who their competition actually is? And how did you guys translate that into your own story?
George Kurtz:Yeah, so to be clear, I don't consider any of those my competition. I consider those our peers in terms of cloud-defining platform companies, right? So... you know, we're defining the security cloud, ServiceNow, you know, ITSM cloud, et cetera. So we don't compete. In fact, we partner with some of them. But when we think about our competition, you know, obviously we have the legacy players and, you know, Symantec and Mac through the world and some of the next gen players who, you know, at this point, a lot of them got bought up, right? The game has been played out. It's a little like Siebel and Salesforce, right? Where you have a much bigger platform player that's, you know, is able to kind of disrupt the market. Even the largest player, Symantec, got bought. which is, again, it's analogous to what we saw at Siebel and Salesforce. Siebel was the market leader, had over 50% market share and got crushed by Salesforce and had to sell to Oracle for, I think it was five and a half billion. And you look at Salesforce at 130 or 40 or 50, whatever their market cap in billions is now. So that's the way we look at it. And we track the competition. We're always respectful. We don't dismiss any of the competitors that are out there. And I think, you know, we focus on making the best product. And, you know, another racing analogy is, I mean, I love to race. And if you drive in your mirrors, you know, you're guaranteed to crash, right? So if you're looking at your competition trying to pass you and you're just going to go on the wall and we focus on looking at the windshield and about, you know, where we need to go, that allows us to get there faster and not be distracted, but always realize that, you know, we're still in a really important race.
Tony Olzak:Hey, George, on that note, we were talking to Todd earlier, and sometimes we talk about work-life balance, and found out that you were racing Audi R8s. How do you find the time to fit that in, and is that still a part of your life? We'd love to hear more about that.
George Kurtz:He races them to work. I don't have to. I just walk to my office at home. Yeah, so race-wise, I've raced all kinds of things. I have raced Audi R8s, McLarens, other high-downforce cars. I've been racing a Mercedes GT3 R for probably two years now, the full race car version, not the street car version. And that's been a lot of fun. And we've really worked that into CrowdStrike. We actually have a CrowdStrike racing program where we bring customers in for a half-a-day roundtable. We talk about security and then They're part of the event and dinner is really to meet and share experiences with security, but also part of racing. We've had customers driving the backseat with Mario Andretti in some of the races that we've been at where we've been the warm-up back for Indy, but Mario's there. We've partnered with them. Just experiences that people would never have had. It's really been a cool way to integrate racing into CrowdStrike. We sponsor the Mercedes Formula One team, so we've had Lewis Hamilton involved with our customers, and we've done some fun things there. So it's worked out, I think, really well, and particularly when you can sort of blend these cool things into business and turn it into the pipeline. I mean, that's always the holy grail.
Todd Gallina:Yeah, you know, all great companies are reflections of their co-founders and CEOs, and I love how you've taken that passion and infused it into the business. That's great information. I imagine like when you do these customer events that you're going to have just some customers show up and they're going to have a full racing jumpsuit on for, you know, the round table before they race.
George Kurtz:Well, we do get a lot of gearheads that love going there. And it's just great to see people, you know, show up with their race shoes on and all kinds of stuff. But, you know, I think that's part of it. It's just being in that atmosphere. And, you know, it's not different than golf. I mean, there's a lot of folks who like to golf and go to those events and, you know, get to meet the professionals. And in our events, you know, to have Marianne Dreddy come and speak, you know, to a group, a small intimate group, you know, a select group of our customers get to go on a ride with the guy in his double-seater car that you've probably seen on TV. I mean, it's super special, right? Yeah. You know, you can ask a lot of people, have you been to Super Bowl? Yes. Have you been to World Series? Yeah. Hockey, you know, Stanley Cup. Go down a list. You can get any executive probably has been to all of those. I have never... seen one executive come to our event that's ever, ever been in a car with Mario Andretti, just beforehand. Never happened, right? Probably would never happen again. No. That's pretty cool.
Todd Gallina:That's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And that's what customers are looking for, things they can't buy. Experience is great. Well, George, I'm sure I'm speaking for Tony when I say this. You've been incredible. We've learned an absolute ton. I wanted to just maybe close out And just ask you, is there anything we missed? Is there anything you'd like to share with potential founders about your journey?
George Kurtz:Sure. I think it's really important from the start to make sure that you have a clear plan of what you want to do and an understanding of where you can fit in the market and not take the criticism of, it can't be done. I think it really is that classic, everybody's going to say you can't do it. It could be your family, it could be your friends, it could be your co-workers. And I think the most important thing to realize is it's really about fortitude. You have to just break through walls every day. It's not a race. It's really a marathon of hurdles. You have to just have that fortitude and determination to just get through it. Getting through the crowd, you're just moving people out of the way and getting to where you need to go. You're not going to stop until you get there. I think that's really the most important thing. I think it's a you know, it's a great path. I think there's a lot of people who are too risk averse. And, you know, if they, if they believe in themselves and they want to bet on themselves, they probably will have a better outcome. So if you, if you believe in yourself and you have a great idea and you can pull together a great team, then, you know, go for it.
Tony Olzak:Oh, fantastic advice, George. Appreciate you joining us today. That was amazing.
George Kurtz:Well, thanks so much, Todd and Tony. I appreciate it. And look forward to chatting again. You got it, George.
Outro:Trace3 is hyper-focused on helping IT leaders deliver business outcomes by providing a wide variety of data center solutions and consulting services. If you're looking for emerging technology to solve tried and true business problems, Trace3 is here to help. We believe all possibilities live in technology. You can learn more at trace3.com slash podcast. That's trace the number three dot com slash podcast.
Todd Gallina:Until next time.