Empowered by HackerOne

Today we kicked off the new fiscal year for HackerOne at our Empower 2024 event. Last year came with ups and downs and ups again. We built a powerful AI practice. We completed the leadership team. Hacker engagement rose to an all-time high, translating into higher security for our customers. As a result, hacker rewards are now well beyond the $300 million we announced last year.

We have built an innovative model that brings human curiosity at scale together with highly automated AI.

Here is a summary of my kick-off presentation to our employees which I am happy to share with the world. Perhaps it inspires broader audiences and hopefully it triggers you to comment back to me and share your observations. At HackerOne we practice transparency and we know there is just one way to do cybersecurity: together.

The world is facing problems more serious than just a year ago. War and geopolitical tension are at our doorsteps. Climate change is an unresolved problem. In the digital world it is difficult to distinguish true from false. The young are distressed by the direction the world is taking. Cyber attacks by criminals and nation-states are rampant, especially in election years.

We have our work cut out for us at HackerOne, addressing one of the major planetary challenges. We take a pragmatic approach and believe that step by step, working together, we make the digital world a safer place. Our track record so far gives us confidence that this is true.

We know that all great endeavors are built on curiosity. It is time to be humble about what we think we know, and bold about what we think we can achieve, when we go all-in together.?

The world is right now in a shift of technological paradigms that will upend old business models and businesses. AI is redefining the relationship between humans and software. It is bringing us automation of complex tasks, allowing and demanding humans to step up to a higher level. AI brings an entirely new dimension of performance to the curious mind and ruthlessly exposes the inattentive mind. You could say AI pushes us to more clearly define what it means to be human.

In my presentation to all hackeronies, I reiterated our business goals for the new fiscal year. We have a growth target that we intend to exceed. We will strengthen our category leadership through smart application of AI and other innovations. We are becoming a leading vendor in the pentesting business, often called PTaaS in modern terms. Operationally, it will be AI in everything we do.

For our hackers, this will mean more programs to work on, more opportunities to collaborate, AI-driven curation of vulnerability submissions, and new work in AI Red Teaming engagements.

For our customers, our work will result in more value from bug bounty programs while making the programs easier to operate. Our own AI deployment “Hai” will help automate tasks, and several hundred of hackers are ready to test both the security and safety of customers’ AI deployments. Other innovations and improvements will allow us to serve our customers more broadly and effectively across the software-development lifecycle and security practices.

When we look at the longer-term development of the HackerOne business, we base it on a few fundamental practices. To start with, we represent a new industry category within cybersecurity, and development of this category is an on-going task. As the leader, it is up to us to stake out the direction this category is taking. Category design is a recurring theme in our strategy sessions.

Secondly, we believe trust is the most valuable asset we have. We carefully build our brand and take great care of our reputation. We practice openness and always look for feedback. When something goes wrong, we own up to it and fix it. Trust builds slowly but can be lost quickly. Our ambition is to always be a worthy recipient of the trust of our hackers and customers.

Thirdly, we have been expanding into the enterprise market for several years by now, and this motion continues. We make sure our offerings meet the requirements of the most discerning corporate clients who operate the world’s largest and most valuable digital assets. We undertake demanding product development initiatives that aim to address their most pressing needs.

As the fourth fundamental practice we have innovations that bring human curiosity at scale together with highly automated AI. We have spent 10 years learning how to engage a massive community of ethical hackers and bring their ingenuity to bear with our customers. Adding to that, we now have an AI deployment that complements and augments the power of ethical hacking.?

We are very excited about our AI progress so far. But we also know this is just the beginning. The opportunities for new innovations in this cross-section of humans and AI are enormous. In all likelihood, the world is now standing at the beginning of an era that will redefine everything digital. There will be security and safety aspects to deal with firmly, and there will be new value creation not seen before.?

HackerOne is uniquely positioned in this new world, with access to two million curious hackers and a powerful and rapidly evolving AI deployment. Humans without AI are not that productive, nor is AI without humans.

Rounding up my presentation to all H1 employees, I reiterated what a strong foundation we are standing on.?

We have a highly performing team with a unique culture of openness and collaboration. We finished last year at a massive business number. We are the category leader with the right and duty to innovate and drive progress. We have built our business carefully, not raising capital at untenable valuations and still not having touched the round we raised two years ago. In our business we have product lines that are leaders in their spaces, growing faster than the market. The hackers are fully engaged and our customers are loving what we do.

We can feel strong. Yet we must remain humble about what we think we know and what we claim we have achieved. Trust is something to earn every day, and the accomplishments that matter lie in the future. We are going after them as one team, working together, all in.

Marten Mickos

CEO, HackerOne