Debasis Mohapatra
Bengaluru, 4 August 2024
Last month, the world saw one of the worst outages in Microsoft owing to a system update by cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike.
A defective Falcon software update from CrowdStrike caused this Microsoft outage, leading to severe disruption in aviation, medical services, government services and other systems across the world. As outage spread, George Kurtz- the Founder & CEO of CrowdStrike was at the forefront of resolving this crisis.
Who is George Kurtz?
George Kurtz is a first-generation entrepreneur, who has made it big in the technology world. The 59-year-old tech entrepreneur is a native of Parsippany, New Jersey (US). He studied accounting at Seton Hall University. After completing college, Kurtz started his career at the global accounting firm, PwC. Interestingly, he was one of the initial hires of PwC’s security group.
Kurtz, who didn’t grow up wealthy, climbed the professional steps through his expertise. In 1999, he started Foundstone- a cybersecurity company that was into the anti-virus software space. This was acquired by McAfee in October of 2004 for $90 million, as per reports.
He along with Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California, and launched the company in 2012 post securing $25 million in funding. Alperovitch later left the company CrowdStrike went public in 2019.
Net worth:
Since its inception, CrowdStrike has emerged as one of the leading cybersecurity firms of the world. It currently has a presence in 170 countries with an employee base of 7,900 people by the end of January 2024. It counts Google, Amazon, Intel, Target (retail major), Formula One team Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS and the US government among others. Such a marquee client base and growing business have put George Kurtz on the billionaire list with a net worth of around $3.1 billion. As the share price of CrowdStrike has corrected since the incident, it has negatively impacted Kurtz’s net worth. The cybersecurity firm’s share price corrected 44% to $217.89 in the last month on Nasdaq. It is worth mentioning how CrowdStrike under Kurtz will navigate the emerging complexities in the next quarters after such a huge outage incident.
