George Kurtz

George Kurtz served as the Chief Technology Officer at McAfee in 2010 when he realized that signature-based antivirus was obsolete against nation-state advanced persistent threats, a realization that led him to resign and found CrowdStrike in 2011 with a vision for cloud-native endpoint protection.

George Kurtz is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrowdStrike, having led the company from its inception in 2011 to a $65 billion market capitalization enterprise software giant. Prior to founding CrowdStrike, Kurtz served as the Chief Technology Officer at McAfee, where he oversaw the development of the company’s endpoint security products and gained firsthand insight into the limitations of signature-based antivirus software. Kurtz’s technical expertise and visionary leadership were instrumental in architecting the Falcon platform’s cloud-native, single-agent architecture, which revolutionized the cybersecurity industry by eliminating the performance degradation associated with legacy security software. Under his leadership, CrowdStrike has achieved a 36% compound annual growth rate, expanded its total addressable market to $100 billion, and established the Threat Graph as the industry’s most comprehensive telemetry engine. Kurtz is a frequent speaker at global security conferences and a recognized expert in adversary tradecraft, threat intelligence, and cloud-native security architecture.