chief technology officer
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The hidden benefits of adding a CTO to your board
The pandemic forced companies around the world to adjust to a “new normal,” which caused many leaders to pivot their business strategies and adopt new technologies to continue operations. In a time of chaos and change, there is no senior leader that can navigate this sort of change better than a CTO.
Not only do CTOs understand the ever-changing tech landscape, they also provide invaluable insights to help organizations go beyond traditional IT conversations and leverage technology to successfully scale businesses.
Boards are facing pressure to be strategic and thoughtful on how to evolve in the rapidly iterating world of technology, and a CTO is uniquely positioned to address specific challenges.
There are now more reasons than ever to consider adding a CTO to your board. As a CTO myself, I know how important and impactful it can be to have technical-minded leaders on a company’s board of directors. At a time when companies are accelerating their digital transformation, it’s critical to have diverse technical perspectives and people from varying backgrounds, as transformations are a mix of people, process and technology.
Drawing on my experience on Lightbend’s board of directors, here are five hidden benefits of making space at the table for a CTO.
A unique mind (and skill) set
Currently, most boards of directors are composed of former CEOs, CFOs and investors. While such executives bring vast experience, they have very specific expertise, and that frequently does not include technical proficiency. In order for a company to be successful, your board needs to have people with different backgrounds and expertise.
Inviting different perspectives forces companies out of the groupthink mentality and find new, creative solutions to their problems. Diverse perspectives aren’t just about the title –– racial ethnicity and gender diversity are clearly a play here as well.
Deep understanding of tech
For a product-led company, having a CTO who has been close to product development and innovation can bring deep insights and understanding to the boardroom. Boards are facing pressure to be strategic and thoughtful on how to evolve in the rapidly iterating world of technology, and a CTO is uniquely positioned to address specific challenges.
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How to respond to a data breach
I cover a lot of data breaches. From inadvertent exposures to data-exfiltrating hacks, I’ve seen it all. But not every data breach is the same. How a company responds to a data breach — whether it was their fault — can make or break its reputation.
I’ve seen some of the worst responses: legal threats, denials and pretending there isn’t a problem at all. In fact, some companies claim they take security “seriously” when they clearly don’t, while other companies see it merely as an exercise in crisis communications.
But once in a while, a company’s response almost makes up for the daily deluge of hypocrisy, obfuscation and downright lies.
Last week, Assist Wireless, a U.S. cell carrier that provides free government-subsidized cell phones and plans to low-income households, had a security lapse that exposed tens of thousands of customer IDs — driver’s licenses, passports and Social Security cards — used to verify a person’s income and eligibility.
A misconfigured plugin for resizing images on the carrier’s website was blamed for the inadvertent data leak of customer IDs to the open web. Security researcher John Wethington found the exposed data through a simple Google search. He reported the bug to TechCrunch so we could alert the company.
Make no mistake, the bug was bad and the exposure of customer data was far from ideal. But the company’s response to the incident was one of the best I’ve seen in years.
Take notes, because this is how to handle a data breach.
Their response was quick. Assist immediately responded to acknowledge the receipt of my initial email. That’s already a positive sign, knowing that the company was looking into the issue.
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CrowdStrike’s new CTO says the coronavirus era is ‘business as usual’
Two months ago, seemingly out of nowhere, CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch decided it was time to depart.
Alperovitch, who served as the cybersecurity giant’s chief technology office since its 2011 debut, said he was leaving to launch a non-profit policy accelerator. CrowdStrike named Michael Sentonas, who managed the firm’s tech strategy for three years, as his replacement.
The news came at a critical time for the maker and seller of subscription-based endpoint security software that protects against breaches and cyberattacks. The company’s stock was in recovery after it fell below its IPO price, just months after popping 90% on its first day on the public market. It was one of the biggest offerings of the year, reaching more than $11 billion in value by the end, a far cry from a decade earlier when the security giant started out as a few notes scribbled on a napkin in a hotel lobby.
And then the pandemic happened.
By the time of his appointment, Sentonas was preparing to move to the U.S. from his native Australia, but “that hasn’t been the easiest thing to work through,” he told TechCrunch in a recent call. Despite having to balance the time difference and often swapping days with nights, the newly-appointed chief technology officer says it’s largely been “business as usual” for CrowdStrike.
Here’s why.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
TechCrunch: Two months ago, you were appointed chief technology officer at CrowdStrike. Prior to that you were vice president of tech strategy. How have things been since the promotion?
Michael Sentonas: In some respects, things have been business as usual. A lot of the work I was doing around tech strategy and longer-term vision about [what] we should be working on hasn’t changed for me. Obviously, when one of the co-founders moves on, they have big shoes to fill. So, I’ve inherited a larger team. It’s working with the team around what can I assist them with to help us continue to focus. Probably the biggest change is just being stuck here because of what’s going on around the world and just adjusting to largely covering a U.S. timezone from Australia, which isn’t easy.
That can’t be easy?
We’re a globally-spread and globally-diverse organization. The last statistic that I looked at a few weeks ago was that 70% of our staff logins are remote. I’m dealing with Europe and the U.S., that’s just the way we’re spread. It’s all around the world.
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Peep the future of distributed ledgers with the leaders of Hyperledger, Parity Technologies and Tradeshift
As cryptocurrencies emerge from the speculative bloodletting of the past months, believers in the promise of distributed ledger technologies for business and consumer applications are casting about for what comes next.
On our stage at Disrupt San Francisco we’ll be welcoming some of the leading thinkers in how distributed ledgers can create an entirely new architecture for computing and new processes for almost every conceivable transaction framework.
For Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, distributed ledger technologies represent a powerful path for the future of networked computing — no matter the underlying technology. That’s why Behlendorf –through the Linux Foundation — is investing resources in ensuring that viable open source distributed ledger projects are supported and coming to market for any number of applications for businesses and consumers.
One of the leading lights of the internet revolution, Behlendorf’s career shaping the future of the networked world began in 1993 when he co-founded Organic Inc. — the first business dedicated to building commercial websites. Going on to become one of the foundational architects of the Apache http protocol, Behlendorf has served as the chief technology officer of the World Economic Forum and as an executive director for the technology investment fund, Mithril Capital.
Meanwhile, Parity Technologies is attempting to ensure that businesses don’t need to worry about the underlying technologies at all. Selling a suite of services that are all enabled by distributed ledger technologies and cryptographic computing, Jutta Steiner is giving businesses a way through the maze of competing protocols with a service that can enable the creation and adoption of distributed apps for businesses.
“We see it as a way for people to build blockchains that fulfill their particular needs,” Steiner told our own Samantha Stein at our Blockchain event earlier this year in Zug. “One of the challenges we’re addressing in this is to come up with a scalable framework.”
Before Parity, Steiner was responsible for security and partner integration within the Ethereum Foundation when the public blockchain first launched in 2015. Steiner also co-founded Project Provenance — a London based start-up that employs blockchain technology to make supply chains more transparent.
Supply chains are at the heart of Tradeshift’s offerings — and the company is hoping that distributed ledgers will be too. That’s why the company created Tradeshift Frontiers, an innovation lab and incubator that will focus on transforming supply chains through emerging technologies, such as distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.
“The use cases we’re working through Frontiers cover a very wide variety of themes, including supply chain financing, asset liquidity, and supply chain transparency,” said Gert Sylvest, co-founder and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers, at the time. “There is so much more potential than just cryptocurrencies.”
That potential will be one of the things that Sylvest, Steiner, and Behlendorf discuss. We’ll hope you’ll be in the audience to listen.
Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.
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