Introducing Ryan Gurney as YL Ventures' CISO-in-Residence

Today I’m thrilled to announce the addition of YL Ventures’ newest CISO-in-Residence, Ryan Gurney. Ryan was most recently the CSO at Looker, a data analytics startup later acquired for $2.6B by Google, where he continued as CSO post-acquisition. Ryan’s vast industry experience includes security engineering leadership roles at Zendesk, Engine Yard, and eBay, and we are beyond excited to have him as part of the team!

Over the past few years, the CISO-in-Residence role has become an integral component of YL Ventures’ strategy of providing value-add support to Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneurs. By carving out a role in our core team for someone with a deep and current customer perspective, we have further broadened our industry expertise, while providing our portfolio companies with fresh perspectives on how to tackle the challenges they face throughout their lifecycle. Building off of incredibly rewarding experiences with our past CISOs-in-Residence, Roger Hale (now CSO at BigID) and Sounil Yu (now CISO & Head of Research at JupiterOne), we feel incredibly fortunate to welcome Ryan to the role. 

As CISO-in-Residence, Ryan will impart his exceptional knowledge and understanding of today’s security landscape to help founders match unique solutions to tangible problems. Ryan will be working with great teams both pre and post-investment, as they first look to identify big opportunities, and later aim to execute on those visions. Ryan will leverage his customer-centric approach to help portfolio companies understand buyer needs and challenges, as they navigate an increasingly complex security landscape. 

Ryan has been part of YL Ventures’ close network since July 2018, when he officially joined as a Venture Advisor. Since the very beginning, Ryan has been an extremely active and dedicated advisor, serving as an incredible asset to our community. His fresh ideas and insightful perspective have earned him the respect and admiration of both the YLV team and our growing portfolio - and now we all are excited to benefit from his full attention.

As Ryan began to ramp up, I sat with him for some Q&A to discuss some of his thinking around the security industry as a whole and on what he hopes to accomplish with this role:

John (J): How does your experience as a security leader at Looker (a startup that was eventually acquired by Google) help you think about advising portfolio companies?

Ryan (R): I have gotten to work at a company that failed (EngineYard), a high growth company that I helped go public (Zendesk), and as you mentioned one that got acquired by Google (Looker). From an advising standpoint, my past roles have allowed me to share a broad set of experiences. For Looker specifically, we needed to be a small and nimble team. This required us to focus on security solutions that met our budgets, reduced the need to hire more, and ideally accomplished multiple needs across the company, even helping other organizations. Such considerations required collaboration and tight diligence. I will bring this perspective to the portfolio companies to reinforce the need to consider the constraints buyers may have and provide them with a competitive advantage.

J: For a long time you looked at startups as a buyer and now you will look at them more as an investor. What's the difference in those perspectives?

R: Buying and investing are actually fairly similar. As a buyer (or advising a buyer internally), security was an integral aspect, but it was not our sole consideration. I also encouraged assessing vendor viability and support as key pieces to the buying process. Likewise, as an investor, I expect that the startup has a vision of how they will appease the customer in these areas and others. As an investor, I am looking beyond a year or two, so the company viability, competitive marketplace, and founder's experiences play a larger role in the overall investing decision.

J: What are you passionate about within the world of cybersecurity?

R: Raising security capabilities in an efficient and risk-driven way. We have a massive supply and demand ‘people’ problem in security. As CISOs, we need tools that provide actionable intelligence, filter out all unnecessary noise and automate a response. We need tools to ensure that our supply chain management processes highlight key risks, without being bogged down by excessive lower risk noise. We need to empower and enable our sales teams to accurately and transparently share our company and product's security posture without excessive meetings, questionnaires, or contract addendums. There are many opportunities for automation to allow security analysts to spend more time on actual analysis, while offloading other quick decision-making to systems.

J: What do you personally & professionally expect from the CISO-in-Residence role? And what are you most excited to bring from your experience to Israeli cybersecurity founders?

R: On a personal note, I look forward to gaining more exposure to the business side of investing and the opportunity to interact with a multitude of sharp and motivated people in this space. Professionally, I am excited for the opportunity to expand my network and share my successes and failures in managing a company's security posture. I am most excited to bring my insight into what buyers look for in a security product and vendor relationship, as well as help founders tackle CISO / security management pain points.

J: How has your view/perspective/impression of YLV's strategy and work changed since joining as a Venture Advisor in 2018?

R: In the beginning, it was sometimes hard to see how the firm’s investments would play out, but now that there is time between investments and exits, the investments have been successful, indicating to me the rigor of the due diligence process, the strength of the advisory network, the alignment of investments with security problem spaces, and the benefit of the added value services that YL Ventures brings to partner with the portfolio companies in their growth. 

And with that, we officially welcome Ryan to the YL Ventures team, and we look forward to working and learning together in the coming months!