2011. George Kurtz, who had been CTO of McAfee, co-founds CrowdStrike with Gregg Marston, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Bimal Patel. The founding premise was specific: legacy antivirus software was broken because it relied on signature databases — lists of known bad files — that required constant updates and caught nothing new until after the first victim was already compromised. The signature model was reactive. The future was behavioral. The Falcon platform emerged from stealth in 2012 with a cloud-native architecture that sent telemetry to a central processing system rather than running detection logic locally on each endpoint. That architectural decision was controversial. Enterprise security buyers were accustomed to owning their security infrastructure. Sending endpoint telemetry to a third-party cloud was a trust leap. CrowdStrike spent the early years making the case that cloud-based threat detection was faster and more comprehensive than on-premise alternatives. The 2016 attribution of the Democratic National Committee hack to Russian intelligence — published by CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations team — put the company on the front page of every newspaper in America. The attribution was contested by Russian officials and, briefly, by domestic political actors. The controversy generated more public attention for CrowdStrike than any marketing campaign could have purchased. The 2019 NASDAQ IPO raised $612 million at an initial valuation of approximately $6.6 billion, giving Kurtz the currency to accelerate platform development. The post-IPO expansion into identity protection, threat intelligence, and cloud security transformed the company from an endpoint vendor into a broader security platform — which is exactly what the 115% net dollar retention rate reflects.