Dmitri Alperovitch: Building CrowdStrike and defending against nation states

There are plenty of great startups solving impactful problems in security. Very few, however, ever grow to achieve the scale of CrowdStrike - a company that has rightfully become a household name in the industry. Today, CrowdStrike has a market cap of over $70 billion, making it one of the world's 300 most valuable companies. In the inaugural episode of ‘Inside the Network,’ we sit down with Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, to discuss his journey before, during, and after building this iconic company. 

Dmitri walks us through his childhood, immigrating from Russia to the US, and the early days of his entrepreneurship journey. He then opens up about some of the hard decisions CrowdStrike had to make to win. He goes on to share his approach to investing in startups today, and what he looks for when evaluating founders and markets.

In addition to investing and supporting founders, Dmitri has also started the policy think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and written a new book - 'World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century'. In the last part of the episode, he discusses the threat China’s current ruling party poses, why US citizens should care about what happens between China and Taiwan, and how to ensure that the US remains the world’s leading power for decades and centuries to come.

Episode Transcript

Sid Trivedi (00:05):
Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.

Ross Haleliuk (00:09):
I I am Ross Haleliuk

Mahendra Ramsinghani (00:11):
and I am Mahendra Ramsinghani. We have
spent decades building,investing, and researching
cybersecurity companies.

Sid Trivedi (00:20):
On this podcast, we invite you to join us inside the
network, where we bring the bestfounders, operators, and
investors building the future ofcyber.

Ross Haleliuk (00:32):
We will talk about the hard parts of the
founder journey. Launchingcompanies, getting to product
market fit, raising capital, andscaling to an exit.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (00:43):
And, yes, we will also be talking about
epic failures.

Sid Trivedi (00:46):
But, Mahendra, we're here to make the founder
journey easier.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (00:50):
That is correct, Sid. But we cannot make
it too much easier becausestartups are hard. And, of
course, you already knew that.Alright, YouTube. Enough.

Ross Haleliuk (01:00):
Let's get started with this week's episode.

Sid Trivedi (01:06):
Hey, Dmitri. Welcome to Inside the Network.

Dmitri Alperovitch (01:09):
Great to be with you, Sid.

Sid Trivedi (01:11):
We're gonna talk about a couple of different
things today. First, we're gonnatalk a little bit about Dimitri
the person, then we'll talkabout Dimitri the founder, we'll
talk a little bit about Dimitrithe investor, And lastly, we'll
talk about Dimitri thepolicymaker. So let's start with
Dimitri the person and maybestart by sharing with us,

(01:33):
Dimitri, a little bit about yourchildhood, your background,
where you grew up, and when didyou migrate to the United
States.

Dmitri Alperovitch (01:41):
Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Sid. I really
appreciate it. I'm an immigrantto this country like many folks
and, grew up in the formerSoviet Union in the 19 eighties
in Moscow, in fact. And I hadthe opportunity to come to this
country with my parents when Iwas a teenager and grew up, in
the South in Tennessee and thenlater on went to Georgia Tech

(02:03):
and, studied cybersecurity, inAtlanta.
And what got me intocybersecurity is really a hobby
of my dad. So my dad was anuclear physicist in Russia
initially designing nuclearpower plants, and then later
after Chernobyl, helping tobuild simulators for the

(02:23):
reactors to help train theworkforce to avoid accidents
like Chernobyl. And when he wecame over to the United States,
he couldn't get a job in thenuclear industry. The nuclear
industry was in a deep freezemany ways like it is now,
although we might see arevitalization of it, with some
of the new cutting edge modulereactors that are being
developed by some interestingstartups. But, at the time he

(02:45):
just got a job as a programmerand it wasn't very
intellectually stimulating.
So he ended up getting reallydeep into cryptography and
particularly the study ofelliptic curve cryptography. He
had an applied mathematicsbackground. He was really
interested in in the math behindhow the ECC elliptic curve
cryptography worked. And thatwas a hobby for him. And I, even

(03:09):
though I was in high school atthe time, saw the opportunity,
commercial opportunity, and Isort of said, hey.
This, encryption thing isbecoming hot. Maybe we should
start a company together. And,we did. It wasn't anywhere near
as successful as CrowdStrike asyou can imagine because no
one's, heard of it. But, it wasmy first taste of
entrepreneurship, and moreimportantly, it was my first

(03:30):
exposure really to cyber.
And, an early realization gaveme an early realization that
encryption was the not the endall be all and that cyber was
really much more of a cat andmouse game that, you know, if
someone could steal your keys,didn't really matter how secure
your algorithms were. And, it,got me really passionate about

(03:51):
this. And I I think, in part, Igot so interested in it because
I love playing chess, And Ifound cyber to be as
intellectually stimulating andinteresting as chess because the
unique thing about this domain,it's it's one of the few applied
sciences out there where youface a sentient opponent. You
face a human being that is gonnareact to anything that you do.

(04:15):
Right?
Whatever defenses you put up,guess what? The adversary has a
move to play. They can find away around it. And you gotta
think multiple steps ahead tomake sure that, you're still
able to protect your customers,protect your data, and what have
you.

Sid Trivedi (04:27):
Were there any role models that you looked up to in
those early years? Was it yourdad? You spoke a lot about him.

Dmitri Alperovitch (04:32):
It was my dad. Now he ended up staying
kind of in in the crypto space,and I I started focusing on
other things. But, you know, atthe time, this was still a very
new industry. In fact, when Igot my master's degree from
Georgia Tech in cybersecurity, Iwas the 1st graduate out of that
program. It had just been setup.
I kinda had to work on my owncurricular for it because they

(04:54):
sort of didn't have their acttogether in terms of all the
courses and everything else thatthey, obviously do now. So it
was still very, very early on inthe industry.

Ross Haleliuk (05:03):
Interesting. I have been an immigrant twice.
Once moving from Ukraine toCanada and then moving from
Canada to the US. I'm curious,in your experience, what were
some of the early challengeswhen moving to the US? What was
the hardest or maybe the mostsurprising for you?

Dmitri Alperovitch (05:17):
By the way, you know, I I kind of skipped a
little bit, but I had the samepath as you where I moved to
Canada actually originallyfirst, very briefly, and then we
immigrated to the United Statesfrom from Canada. So I can,
totally relate, to your story.Well, to be honest with you, I
mean, there's always challengesyou face as an immigrant sort of
building your life together andnew friends, new schools,

(05:40):
etcetera. But, you know, I Ithink I was pretty lucky that I
I did it when I was still fairlyyoung and I didn't have perhaps
as many issues as others who areolder that have problems
learning the language andadapting to to the culture and
so forth. So I I don't know.
It's a good question, but, Ican't think of the things that

(06:01):
were really, really tough beyondjust life and and making it out
in a new country.

Sid Trivedi (06:07):
You know, I'm curious, how did you think about
your your journey preCrowdStrike? Most folks know
about your your experienceduring your time building out
CrowdStrike, and that was reallythe last, whatever, 15 years of
your life. But very few peoplereally think about Dimitri pre
CrowdStrike. And just give us asense for the types of decisions

(06:28):
you made.

Dmitri Alperovitch (06:28):
Yeah. So right out of college, I joined
the startup called CipherTrust,which was started by Jay
Chaudhry, who now runs Zscaler.And it was an incredible
experience. It's still fairlysmall and and grew to decent
size. It wasn't, you know,unicorn but, it was, still a
pretty good success.
And I was able to join it whenit was still relatively small

(06:50):
and gave me the 1st startup bugin terms of a real significant
sized company. Our familycompany and that I was starting
with my dad in high school neverreally went, big in part because
both of us kinda were distractedme with school and him with a
full time job. So, we couldn'treally dedicate as much time to
it as it needed. But, withCipherTrust, you know, you you

(07:12):
join a a startup early on andyou get to do everything. Right?
You get to do development,product, sales, marketing, and,
it's it's just I highlyrecommend it to anyone out of
coming out of college. Don't goto a big company where you can
be pigeonholed and do one thingfor, like, the next 10 years. In
fact, that that was theexperience that a lot of my

(07:33):
friends from college had wherethey a lot of them went to work
for Microsoft and stayed inthose same jobs for 10 years.
And I moved around and had lotsof different experiences and a
career trajectory that, was,really fantastic. But the other
thing that was great aboutCipherTrust is that it was an
email security.
And they hired me actuallybecause of my crypto background.

(07:54):
Because at the time when I wasjoining them in the early 2000,
email security meant encryptionof email and they had all kinds
of policies to securecommunications between different
companies. And, you know, theyhad good fortune 500 companies
that were buying that stuff. AndI remember I was interviewing
with Jay.

Sid Trivedi (08:13):
And this is Jay being Jay Chaudhry, just to be
clear.

Dmitri Alperovitch (08:16):
Yeah. Of course. And Jay, I don't know if
he still does it, but at thetime, he would literally
interview everyone that's comingin the company. He would always
do it on on Sundays because therest of the week he was doing
other work. Right?
So he's a workaholic. And I wasinterviewing with him and I was
asking about sort of the futureof the product where the roadmap

(08:37):
was going. And he said, youknow, we're gonna take a pause
right now on the policydevelopment around encryption
because we have this thing thatis popping up spam that we gotta
take care of. So we're gonna,like, take a couple of quarters
on the road map to solve spam,and then we'll get back to the
core issue and and, you know,talk to me about how the product
is gonna evolve. And he's like,and and we need you to solve it

(09:00):
for us because you were startingon the research team that, is
gonna be tasked with thateffort.
So as you can imagine, Iabsolutely failed in that in
that task because spam is stillwith us here today, 25 years,
almost 25 years later. AndCipherTrust also never went back
to encryption because spam wentfrom, like, almost 0% of the
world's emails to, like, 98% inthe course of literally, like, a

(09:23):
year and evolved very rapidly.And I tell you, it was such a
great experience to enter thecyber security industry in that
field because virtuallyeverything I learned about the
field and how to thinkstrategically came out of that
experience because nowhere elsedid you see that rapid evolution

(09:43):
on the part of the adversaryreacting quickly to what we were
doing on the spam filter side.Right? So the spam filter in
business started with justkeyword searching.
You got a dictionary ofkeywords, like looking for
things like viagra and so forthand and blocking that. And very
quickly, the attackers evolvedwhere they would start putting
spaces in and, you know,obfuscating those words. And, I

(10:08):
remember Paul Graham wrote ablog post, that Paul Graham of
the YC fame.

Sid Trivedi (10:13):
Founder of YC.

Dmitri Alperovitch (10:15):
Yeah. Founder founder of YC. And he
wrote this blog post about usingbase theorem to block spam,
where you would basically,tokenize the emails and, look at
each token and look at theprobability of that token
appearing in spam versus theprobability of appearing in
email. And it was thisbrilliant, you know, some very

(10:36):
simple mathematical model forhow you could block spam that
when you try it out wasincredibly effective for, like,
3 weeks. Because immediatelywhat the attackers did is they
said, oh, we're gonna just dumpa lot of keywords into our
emails that are present in a lotof legitimate email, like, at
the bottom and and break thebase filter.
And then you would react tothat, and then they would

(10:58):
introduce image spam so youcouldn't tokenize the words, and
on and on and on. And literally,they were reacting so quickly
that as soon as you putsomething out within weeks,
there would be a countermeasureto it. And that was not
happening in any part ofsecurity. Right? In the
vulnerability research, thingstake much longer to evolve.
New attacks, you know, do notappear overnight in terms of,

(11:18):
like, new ways to exploitvulnerabilities or the like. In
in the malware space at thetime, today, things are very
different. It was also very slowprogress where it took, like, 12
to 24 hours to put out asignature for a piece of
malware. And often on theweekends, they wouldn't put out
anything. So the spam industryis really what taught me that

(11:38):
you gotta be much faster thanthe adversary.
It taught me also thatattribution and intelligence
collection on attackers mattersa great deal because I quickly
found out that a lot of the spamwas originating from actors in
Russia. And obviously, I hadRussian skills, so I was able to
get into the forums where theywere discussing the various ways
to bypass different products.And I was at the time, they

(12:01):
weren't very much focused onoperational security. They were
thinking that, you know, if youuse Russian, no one is gonna be
able to figure it out. So youcould easily gain access to
these forums much, much hardertoday because you gotta be
vetted and and so forth.
But at the time, it wasrelatively easy and you could
just sit there and read whatthey were doing and try to react
in advance right before theywould even put anything out. So,

(12:25):
it gave me that appreciation forthe value of threat
intelligence, for the value ofunderstanding who's attacking
you, for the value of buildingsystems that are able to rapidly
collect and analyzeintelligence. In fact, we build
what you would now call thecloud. So initially, you know,
CypherTrust sold appliances. Soit would be sitting in a
customer's environment and youwould push out updates to it

(12:47):
like antivirus where you wouldget like a regular anti spam
update.
And we said, you know, that's a,too slow when you you have an
adversary that's changing thingson an almost minute by minute
basis. And 2, you don't actuallyknow how successful you are and
where the failures are. So wesaid, let's build, we called a
reputation system that wouldbasically query the cloud with

(13:10):
the data about the email, and wehave to be careful that, you
know, you don't expose, forprivacy reasons, the content. So
it would be various hashes thatyou would take out of body of
email and headers and the like.And you would start aggregating
this data and seeing whatattacks are being launched
against all of your customersnow.
So the kind of the networkeffect of the collected threat

(13:31):
intelligence. And then westarted saying, oh my god. We're
starting to collect all thismassive amounts of data. Again,
this was like early 2000. Right?
And why don't we apply machinelearning, or as you would now
call it, AI, to all this data tosee if we can block it
automatically? And, you know, alot of the stuff that's coming
up now, we were actually able tobuild back in those early days.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (13:56):
Dimitry, Dimitry, your background is
indeed very fascinating abouthow you start with, you know,
ECC. You're a chess player. Youadapt and move fast, ideally
faster than the enemy. Talk tous about, as you move into the
CrowdStrike story of yourjourney, how you and George
decided to work together, andhow do cofounders bond so well

(14:21):
where they create an iconiccompany?

Dmitri Alperovitch (14:23):
Yeah. So it it was really opportunistic. So
just, to wrap up the CipherTruststory, CipherTrust ended up
getting sold to another companycalled Secure Computing, which
is a public company. I ended uptaking a bigger role in that
company because that company wasalso doing network security.
They had a firewall business.
They were also doing websecurity. They had one of the

(14:43):
pretty significant market sharesin in web filtering at the time.
And I ended up taking,basically, the research teams
across those platforms under me,including email security. And I
also, at that time, saw thatwhat we did with the cloud with,
email security could be extendedto other areas. And I proposed

(15:07):
to our board to invest in aproduct that would do web based
cloud security.
And the funny thing is that as Iwas doing that, Jay had sold the
company at that point and andwas out. He was having the exact
same revelation, and he startedZscaler with the exact same idea
to do cloud security. So weended up competing very briefly.

(15:29):
It was very brief because SecureComputing ended up getting sold
to McAfee a very short timelater. So just as I launched
that product and started sellingit, we ended up getting absorbed
by McAfee, and McAfee decided topromptly kill that product.
So Jay went on to an incrediblesuccess with Zscaler and my
product, which I thought wasvery competitive and very good,

(15:50):
ended up getting killed inside abig company, which was another
valuable lesson, by the way,about big companies and and, the
lack of innovations and and sortof systemic challenges and and
friction that you face in tryingto innovate inside a big
company. But at McAfee, I endedup taking the role of running
ultimately all the threat threatresearch and, investigations.

(16:12):
And in 2010, I get a call fromthis company called Google that
you may have heard of. And, theyhad just experienced the issue
of China hacking into theirnetworks. And a number of other
companies were impacted in thatsame attack.
And many of them were McAfeecustomers. So they called us to
work on this together and tonotify our customers and and

(16:33):
figure it out. And I ended up,writing that investigation for
us and named it OperationAurora, which I felt at the time
was gonna be a verygroundbreaking thing because
when I realized early on thatthis was a nation state
intrusion into all of thesedifferent companies, the first
time that you had seen in thepublic domain China or any

(16:55):
nation state breaking intocompanies and stealing
intellectual property, Irealized instantly it was gonna
be a watershed moment, which, bythe way, is why I named it
Aurora because Aurora was thename of the Russian battleship
that fired the the shot that wasa signal to Lenin in 1917 to
launch his Bolshevik revolution.It's been called the shot heard

(17:15):
around the world. It changed thecourse of the 20th century,
obviously, with the creation ofthe Soviet Union and the Cold
War.
And I knew that, you know, thiswasn't quite as significant as
the Bolshevik Revolution, but itwould be very significant
certainly for the cybersecurityindustry. Ended up being very
significant for my own career.And the first thing I I did is I

(17:36):
asked, myself, well, is this theonly thing that's happening? Is
this, like, a fluke where Chinajust decided to hack into these
2 dozen companies and that wasit? Or is there a trend to this
where a lot more is going onthan we realized?
And I started looking at ourdata we're collecting at McAfee,
obviously huge customer base,and realized that this was
happening very frequently. Istarted putting out all these

(17:58):
threat reports, night dragon, 10days of rain, which was North
Korean hacks into South Koreanvictims, and then shady rat,
which was another majorunveiling of a group that
actually later became the APTone report. It was the same
group that I put a had put outan early report on back in 2011.
And as I was doing all thesereports, part of that

(18:19):
investigation was notifyingcompanies that had been
victimized. And in almost everycase, when we would pick up the
phone and call them and say,hey, we just discovered that,
you know, the Chinese are yournetworks.
In almost every case, they hadno idea. And, usually, the the
the actors would be in theirnetworks for years, and it would
be a complicated process to getthem out. But I realized that

(18:42):
this was a huge problem and thatno one was really solving it.
And I was trying to kind ofsolve it within McAfee because,
you know, it wasn't necessarilymy intention to go start a
company right away. But, youknow, I saw a problem and a lot
of our customers are gettingbreached.
Let's figure out how to solveit. It was really, really hard
to do at McAfee because it was apublic company very much focused

(19:02):
on the next quarter. We wouldcontinuously have hiring
freezes. Like, you would get abudget for the year. You start
planning how you're gonnaallocate that budget, and then
we miss a quarter and suddenlyall your ex go away.
Right? Very hard to plan, veryhard to innovate. And a lot of
legacy thinking as well, a lotof sort of the antivirus mindset
from the 19 eighties that thisis not really about intrusions.

(19:25):
It's just about malware. And,why do we need to think broader
about this?
So it was very frustrating. Andthen, you know, clearly, there
was a problem. I realized thatwe had ideas how to solve it,
but no one was actually willingto do anything about it. And,
that was sort of the light bulbwent off that this is this is an

(19:46):
opportunity here to start acompany. And also, McAfee at
that that point had also gottensold to to Intel.
And, Intel was an interestingcompany because it was a
hardware company for the mostpart, and we were a software
company. I remember sitting in ameeting with with the Intel
folks before the acquisitionclosed, and we're talking about
all these great ideas of howwe're going to put security in

(20:07):
the silicon and, whatcapabilities they could do. And
I was amazed because they wereso receptive. They they said,
like, literally, all these ideaswe're putting forward, they're
like, yeah. We're gonna do itall.
I was like, wow, this isphenomenal. A 2011 time frame.
And then I said, well, when doyou think you can ship it? And
the answer was like 2020. I waslike, what?

(20:27):
Excuse me? Alright. They'relike, well, yeah, that that's
the first opportunity for us toreally get a lot of this stuff
out. And I'm like, Yeah. I haveno idea what the threat
landscape is even gonna looklike in that time frame.
I'm pretty sure I'm not evengonna be at Intel at that point.
That's just not gonna work. Thethread landscape, remember, back
to the spam days, moved soquickly that you gotta iterate

(20:49):
so quickly, like, getting stuffin hardware over that long
period of time. That'sridiculous. And that's when I
knew, a, I had to leave.
2, there was this big problem.3, that, you know, we we, are
never gonna solve this problemat McAfee. And, yeah, that's
when we got together and startedpitching to various investors.

(21:11):
We actually didn't pitch to thatmany investors.

Sid Trivedi (21:14):
And how did you pick George? Maybe just talk a
little bit about how did youpick George?

Dmitri Alperovitch (21:19):
Well, we were we're working together in
Mac yeah. We're working togetherin McAfee. We're we're, working
on some of these investigationstogether, and he he appreciated
that, this problem as well. And,yeah, we got start started
working together. And, the onthe investment side, we
literally pitched to 2 firms.
We got term sheets from both,and we ended up picking the

(21:39):
better one.

Sid Trivedi (21:40):
And and then how did how did you decide that
that, you know, you were onlygoing to work with George? There
were a whole bunch of amazingpeople at at McAfee, whether
that's, you know, you had folkslike Mike Fay, Mike De Caesar,
Chris was there. How did youpick George specifically?

Dmitri Alperovitch (21:57):
We were just working together. So we worked
together on Aurora, some other,reports and investigations. So
we're spending a lot of time. Isaw the problem, and and it was
just natural.

Ross Haleliuk (22:07):
Yeah. When looking back at successful
companies, it often feels thattheir success was almost
inevitable. And at the sametime, we know that that is not
really the case. So what weresome of the tough decisions that
CrowdStrike had to make for itto get, where it is today?

Dmitri Alperovitch (22:23):
Oh, there were tough decisions every day.
You know, success is never astraight line. And there were
existential threats to thecompany, like, almost every day.
It's amazing, you know. You lookon it now and it seems like, oh
my god.
You guys were just it wasinevitable you would succeed.
That was certainly not the case,and it was a tough slog for a
long time. And there are manydecisions we made that were very

(22:45):
forward thinking. I'm apassionate believer in sort of
the Steve Jobs philosophy offocus, that you gotta really
concentrate on what you're goodat and get rid of all the
distractions and say no. Right?
The focus is all about sayingno. And, you know, we said no to
a bunch of things. So when wewere starting, obviously, we're
building an endpoint securityproduct, and there were still a

(23:07):
lot of Windows XP systems outthere. And we realized early on
that if we decided to supportWindows XP as virtually all of
our I think all of our actuallycompetitors decided to do, that
that would really limitdramatically our architecture,
that we couldn't do all theadvanced things that we wanted
to do and support XP. There arejust too many limitations on

(23:27):
that platform.
So we said, you know what? We'renot gonna support XP. We're just
going to start with Windows 7and above and probably the Mac
and Linux platform later on. Butthat was a tough decision
because many customers are like,I'm moving to Windows 7, but I
still have XP and I may not moveto XP for a couple of years. And
we're like, well, I guess we'renot right for you.
Very tough decision, and we lostdeals because of it. But, it was

(23:49):
the right decision because it'llenable us to build the right
architecture that I thinkultimately helped us win the
market. 2nd, we we knew from theget go that we wanted to do the
cloud. So the same idea that Ihad, you know, back 10 years
earlier at CipherTrust toaggregate all the threat intel
for email and, apply machinelearning to it and so forth, we

(24:09):
could replicate and we shouldreplicate this in endpoint
security. But right away, we hitcustomers and financial sector
and elsewhere.
They were like, we'll never docloud. And it would have been
very easy to say, well, youknow, we'll build you kind of
private on prem solution, andmany of our competitors went
down that path. We said no.That'll break our model. A, that

(24:30):
will create a divergent sort ofengineering track where you're
spending resources on this andthat.
That will slow you down. And 2,the whole model is sort of this
network effect that everyonecontributes their threat data to
the to the cloud and and you'reable to protect everyone as a
result. So we're not gonna dothat. And, again, we lost
customers or prospects becausebecause we just chose to do

(24:51):
that. In the end, we werebelievers that everyone would
one day move to the cloud, whichis what happened, but it
required, you know, strength andand patience.
And, those were tough decisions.So there were there were just a
slew of decisions like thatthat, I think we made early on.
You know, I'll tell you the bestdecision we made is raise as
much money as we did. You know,it doesn't sound like much

(25:13):
today, but, you know, in 2011,we raised $25,000,000 of a
PowerPoint deck. That was a lot.
I mean, today, it's like anaverage seed round, I guess.
But, then it was, it was quite abit. And that really, I think,
more than almost anything else,helped us win because we raised
more than anyone else. What whatI see oftentimes in companies is

(25:35):
they don't raise enough money.They build a prototype.
They kind of demonstrate thatit's somewhat successful. And
then they raise another rounds,an 8 rounds off that prototype.
And then they're like, well,that was a prototype, so we have
to throw it out and we have tostart from scratch and
rearchitect it. Right? We neverdid that.
We built it right from the getgo, And that gave us an

(25:57):
opportunity to keep movingfaster. Right. And didn't slow
us down with the architecturesand the like.

Sid Trivedi (26:02):
Maybe talk a little bit about scaling and scaling
CrowdStrike.

Dmitri Alperovitch (26:06):
Yeah. So, you know, initially, things were
pretty tough because a, cloud.2, we don't support XP. 3, we're
solving the problem that notmany people even know they have,
which is the quote unquote APTproblem. Right?
Because we weren't initially anantivirus. That was later in the
plans, but we thought firstthought, let's solve the hardest

(26:28):
of the hardest problems, whichis how do you defend yourself
against the nation state threat?And and we were detection only
at the time, without anyresponse options. So we're going
to companies who were like,what's an APT? Nation states, do
we even have that problem?
2, your cloud. 3, you don'tsupport all our devices. It was
rough, and it was sort of a slowgoing initially. But, we figured

(26:52):
out that there was a litmus testthat was very easy to determine
whether a prospect early on inthe process, was gonna be the
right one, was gonna get it. Andthat was when we would qualify
them with 2 questions.
The first question is, have youhad an APT incident? And if they
give you blank stares, you knowthat it's time to wrap up the

(27:13):
meeting. And 2, we would ask theCISO about their background. And
if the answer was that they hadjust come out, as a number of
them have, out of thegovernment, out of the
intelligence community, out oflaw enforcement. Even if they
hadn't had an incident, theywere aware of incidents from the
classified realm and wouldunderstand what we were trying
to to do.

(27:34):
And we would have much bettertraction than with people that
had no idea, right, about whatthe threat landscape looked
like. So that kept going for acouple years, and then you you
ultimately kinda hit theinflection point where, you
know, frankly, you know, I gottagive credit to Kevin, the
Mandiant report, the APT onereport that was for the same
group that I covered in my shadyrant report years earlier came

(27:56):
out. It became gave much moreprominence to to the threat
landscape, and, that helped. Andthen we got into a pretty tough
competition with Cylance, acompetitor at the time that was
focused on building an antivirusthat was machine learning based
antivirus, and they started tosee a lot of traction. And we've
always had on our road map theidea that we had to do

(28:19):
prevention and that we had to donot just detection for APT
threats, but detection, andprevention of malware.
But to be honest with you, wefelt like having come out of
McAfee, we knew what it wouldtake to replace McAfee or
Symantec. Then it's sort of likeIBM. No one ever gets fired for
buying it. Right? So to have astart up come in and say, hey.
We're gonna replace your McAfeefootprint seemed like it was

(28:42):
gonna take an enormous amount ofeffort. And we were kind of
pushing it and pushing it untilwe got the the APT thing really
solved. And silence to theircredit spent enormous amounts of
money on marketing, sort ofconvincing people that AV was
broken, which is what you had todo to get people to start
thinking about replacing theirMcAfee and Symantec. So when we

(29:04):
saw that when we saw them createthat opportunity, we immediately
said, okay. We gotta accelerateour efforts, get the AV product
out the door, which we did inrecord time.
And then we had kind of the fullscope solution. We had the AV.
We had the what is now calledEDR, end endpoint detection
response. At the time, there wasno real name for that category.

(29:25):
And, that really just allowed usto to take off.

Sid Trivedi (29:32):
So we go through this journey. You know, you go
public on the Nasdaq. You go andbuild out one of the most
valuable companies that's outthere. And then the beginning of
2020, right before COVID, youannounced that you're you're
effectively retiring. You'reyou're in in some ways retiring.
And then, you know, that's whenI wanna talk a little bit about
Dimitri the investor and Dimitrithe adviser, which is our 3rd

(29:53):
section today. Today, you'renow, you know, this active angel
investor. You're in a wholebunch of companies including a
few that that I've invested in.

Dmitri Alperovitch (30:00):
Not not just angel, really. Every every
stage.

Sid Trivedi (30:03):
What do you yeah. Angel in that, like, you're
investing for yourself. You'renot in you're absolutely right.
You're investing at all stages,but you're investing for
yourself. You don't have ayou're not trying to run a Got
it.
Institutional venture firm. AndI know you don't wanna do that.
What traits do you think definesuccessful founders? You have
been and and we can absolutelysay this, you've become a

(30:26):
successful founder. What do youlook for?

Dmitri Alperovitch (30:28):
You know, that's such a great question.
And, you know, one of the biglessons for me in the last, you
know, 4 years where I've reallybeen focused on this, including
with you where we invested insome great companies together,
is the the importance of theperson over the idea. You know,
it's so easy to fall in lovewith an idea where you you you
get a pitch and you're like,this is perfect. I know exactly

(30:50):
that this is what the marketneeds. The solution is
fantastic.
You know, how quickly can Iwrite this check? And you have
to stop yourself and say, is thefounder right here? Do they have
the perseverance? Are they alearning founder? Or are they,
you know, so focused on, youknow, their own ego and
reputation or whatever thatthey're not willing to take

(31:13):
advice, they're not willing toabsorb data, autocorrect, and
what have you.
How do they deal with adversity?Because you're gonna face it.
You you're gonna faceexistential problems in your
company, guaranteed. And are yougonna have the backbone to be
sort of a wartime CEO and dowhat's necessary, whether it's
to to cut, whether it's topivot, whether it's to, you

(31:34):
know, when things get desperate,you know, get on the phone
yourself with customers and getthose deals closed. Make sure
you get paid.
Make sure you make payroll.Right. And we've seen that in
the last couple of years with alot of companies sort of
experiencing that existentialthreat because it was kind of
easy to start a company in thezero interest rate environment
when there was an unlimitedamount of money and virtually

(31:55):
any idea was getting funded. Andthen suddenly all that dried up
and companies couldn't raiseanymore, and you had to figure
out how to get to profitability.And, many for many, it took too
long to recognize that the worldhas changed and some of them
went out of business.
Right? Or some of those CEOs gotreplaced. And and for others,
they adapted and and were ableto do the right thing. So

(32:16):
looking for the person, it'sreally hard to figure out
whether they've got what ittakes to do this is really,
really important, more importanteven than the market, the idea,
and that's been, I think,something that that is not paid
attention to as much. Experiencematters as well, but but
actually less than theperseverance of the person, the

(32:39):
learning capability that theyhave to just the hunger to to
understand what what what needsto happen.

Ross Haleliuk (32:45):
What is the one piece of advice you find
yourself constantly sharing withthe founders you end up
investing in?

Dmitri Alperovitch (32:51):
I don't know that there is one piece of
advice. One one thing that I dotell them to do is focus. So
many want to do so manydifferent things, and they need
to, particularly in the earlydays, make sure that they become
excellent at the niche thatthey're in and then expand from
there before they try 50different things because if

(33:13):
you're doing too much, thenyou're likely not doing any of
it well. The other thing is theimportance of great hiring.
Don't outsource hiring torecruiters.
Don't outsource hiring to to HR.In fact, you know, you should be
the best recruiter in thecompany. I hired, almost the
entire launch team myself atCrowdStrike and went after

(33:34):
people that I thought I had 1%chance of getting. Right? They
were just the the elites of theelite.
You know, one person I alwayscite is my friend, Alex Zanescu,
that, was our chief architectfor many years. Literally, the
guy who wrote the book,literally, the book on Windows
internals and knew the insideout of operating system better

(33:56):
than anyone else on the planet,like, categorically. Like,
Microsoft would hire him toteach their developers about
what's in the Windows kernel.And he worked at Apple where he
was, you know, doing very well.And when I reached out to him,
it was like, no.
Like, how many times can I tellyou no? And I didn't take no for
an answer. I kept pushing. Ikept pushing. I kept pushing.
And ultimately, he joined, andhe was, an incredible part of

(34:21):
the reason for why we'resuccessful and why we had an
incredibly elegant product andand and highly capable product.
So, you know, going after peoplelike that is just so crucial
and, people settle. You know, Isee founders that are like, oh,
I've got to hire some engineersand, you know, this guy is not
as great as as I want, but Ijust gotta get him into a seat.

(34:42):
And, I'll uplevel them or dosomething with it later. And
that's always, always a mistake.
You know, my my my favoritephrase about hiring is and
frankly, firing, is if you'renot sure, you're sure.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (34:55):
And That's a great piece of advice,
Dimitry, on people. As we lookat investors, one of the
questions that comes up is whatattributes do you look at in
other cybersecurity investors,and what advice would you have
for them? You know, one, textmessage that I just got a few
minutes ago as we look at theinvestment landscape is that

(35:17):
there is companies that arebecoming successful, also
companies that are failing. SoLacework, which is valued at
over 8,000,000,000 is now intalks to be acquired by Wizz for
200,000,000, 300,000,000. It's acompany that had raised
$1,300,000,000 And so themarkets have changed.
The amount of capital that isflowing in has increased. The
number of cybersecurityinvestors have also increased.

(35:39):
So if you were to team up withsome investors, what are the
attributes that you look for,and what advice do you have for
the investment community?

Dmitri Alperovitch (35:46):
Well, stop funding so many features as
opposed to products orcompanies. I I'm actually pretty
negative on investing incybersecurity. I invested in a
few companies, but largelyactually invest outside of
cybersecurity because I just seeso many companies not really
building visionary products.They're building a tiny

(36:06):
improvement on a particularfeature. And the problem we've
had is that over the last 5, 7years, there's been so much
money that virtually any ofthese ideas can get funded.
But now a lot of these companiesare going out of business
because they're not products.They're not platforms. They're
certainly not companies. Andlook for those big ideas that
can really change the game asopposed to just improve things

(36:31):
slightly. Look for ideas thatpeople haven't done before or or
doing something that people havedone before but radically
different in a way that's gonnachange the game.
Right? I mean, we we didantivirus at the end of the day,
but we reinvented what it meantto to have an antivirus. Right?
And, ultimately get you to bevery successful. I I think it's

(36:53):
been relatively easy to be aninvestor in the zero interest
rate environment becausevirtually any company would get
funding, you know, after yearround.
And there was a lot of m and agoing on because it was free
money. And now you see so manyof these funds struggling and
realizing that, oh my god.Actually, like, just even
returning capital in a fund isreally, really difficult. Right?

(37:16):
Much less, you know, having a 2x or 3 x fund that that you're
returning.
And you gotta be much morediscerning about the
opportunities and the checksthat you write.

Sid Trivedi (37:28):
Dimitri, let's switch into the last section of
our podcast which is Dimitri thepolicy maker. And, you know, I'm
curious to get your thoughts onon even that concept. But while
you've been this investor andadvisor post CrowdStrike, you've
all also spent a lot of timethinking about geopolitics and
what's happening in in, youknow, the the world as a whole.

(37:51):
And you did 2 things. 1, rightafter leaving CrowdStrike, you
co founded this new policy thinktank called Silverado Policy
Accelerator.
And the second piece was youwrote you you've been working on
this book which you which you'vejust launched and by the time
the listeners are listening tothis this podcast episode, it it
will be out on the shelves andon Amazon to buy, which is

(38:12):
called World on the Brink. Whatmotivated you to do both these
things? Because they're verydifferent from the cyber
security community that you'vebeen part of for way over 2
decades.

Dmitri Alperovitch (38:22):
Well, I guess I always straddle this
area and in in college as I wastaking all these cyber courses,
I was also taking a lot ofinternational affairs courses.
I've always been passionateabout this. I've always been
passionate about giving back andwas actually an adviser to the
Department of Defense, while Iwas at CrowdStrike and and, did
a number of other things toadvance the national security

(38:43):
interests of this country thathas been so good to me, and I
felt it was important tocontribute back. And I really
have always been passionateabout trying to do more to
figure out how do we make surethat this century remains an
American century, the way thatthe, 20th century was. And I've

(39:04):
been, particularly since Auroradays and even before then,
Aurora really put this front andcenter in my mind.
Been very concerned about Chinaand what China was doing to rip
off our intellectual property,to engage in all kinds of anti
competitive practices, to engagein their military buildups in
the region. And the concern thatI had is that we weren't paying

(39:26):
a attention to that and b, notleveraging the strengths that we
had here in America with ourinnovation engine, with our
incredible military assets, thedefense industrial base, the
economy, to actually make surethat we defeat China in this new
Cold War that we'reunquestionably in. And I make
the case in the book that we arein this Cold War, which is

(39:47):
actually remarkably similar tothe first one. I actually
compare go back through the coldwar one history as I call it and
look at what was going on then,what is happening now, and how
similar the two conflicts are.And, you know, I wrote this book
and and really the work we do atSilverado is making sure that we
can, a, define what winningmeans in this new cold war, and

(40:10):
how do we actually achieve thatvictory.
And what we means is actuallynot a trivial thing to
understand because, you know,during Cold War 1, it was kind
of relatively easy because wehave the benefit of this
gentleman named George Cannon,one of the great, international
affairs thought leaders back inthe in the first Cold War, who

(40:31):
was actually stationed in Moscowon on behalf of the US
government, the statedepartment. He wrote the
telegram that was called thelawn telegram. There was a later
publishes an article in foreignaffairs that basically outlined
the entire strategy for winningthe Cold War. And his big
revelation was that Soviet Unionwas this unnatural entity that
would one day fall apart becauseof all of the challenges that

(40:54):
they would face with the ethnicminorities and ethnic nations
like Ukraine and, Belarus andthe Baltics and others that
would one day wanna be their owncountries. And his revelation
was that we just need to waitthem out and and avoid getting
into a disastrous war and wewould win.
Well, with China, China is notgoing anywhere. Right? It's been

(41:15):
around 5000 years. It'll bearound for another 5, 10000
years. Who knows?
And even the leadership ofChina, there's a lot of people
in DC that have these dreams ofone day, the CCP will fall.
Well, maybe one day it willfall, but we can't count on
that. And frankly, when you lookat the case of Russia, the
Communist Party did fall inRussia. Well, we're not facing
Vladimir Putin. Is that reallyany better?

(41:36):
So just counting on the regimechange that you can't even
affect in any way seems like apipe dream. So, you know, I
wrote the book looking at allaspects of this competition with
China, the military dimension,the diplomatic, the economic,
the technology one, the cyberone. And how do we
systematically define what itmeans to win and how do we

(41:57):
actually achieve that? And Ithink this is an incredibly
important issue right nowbecause most people most
Americans, I think, do notappreciate the precarious state
that we're in today, that we'retruly a world on the brink, that
we're heading towards a conflictthat is almost unimaginable.
Right?
I believe that China couldinvade Taiwan as soon as 4 years

(42:18):
from now, as soon as 2028. Infact, the book starts out with a
detailed scenario of invasionthat I've spent a lot of time
researching, spending time inTaiwan, spending time with
military experts in Taiwan andand in the US military, thinking
through how you would actuallyaccomplish it. And if that
happens, that will change theworld in much greater ways that

(42:39):
even the Ukraine conflict haschanged the world and it has.
Obviously, it made us all lesssecure. It helped create more
inflation.
It, created all kinds ofinstability in Europe and so
forth. This is gonna be a 1000times more impactful. And
particularly, of course, if ifthe United States actually
chooses to fight for Taiwan aspresident Biden has now said on

(43:00):
4 occasions that he would sendAmerican troops to fight for
Taiwan. You're talking about aconflict between 2 nuclear
powers, and who knows if itstays conventional.

Ross Haleliuk (43:10):
So why should US citizens care about what happens
in Taiwan?

Dmitri Alperovitch (43:13):
Great question, and my book answers
that question. So a number ofreasons, and I'll talk about it
from a purely sort of selfishAmerican perspective. Right?
There's obviously humanitarianreasons, protecting freedom,
this dip, democratic outpost inin Asia. Taiwan is a very
vibrant democracy, but, youknow, frankly, that's also true

(43:35):
of Ukraine.
And, we're not fighting forUkraine. Right. So why is Taiwan
different? A lot of people wouldsay, and some have said
political establishment in thiscountry, that it's chips. And
look, chips are important.
And Taiwan is manufacturingabout 60% over 60% of the
world's semiconductors, whichare critical to everything.
Right? AI, manufacturing ofiPhones and laptops and cars and

(43:56):
microwaves, you name it. Theentire economy runs on chips. So
if China invades, that will endbecause those fabs will get
destroyed very likely in thecourse of invasion, and it will
be a disastrous outcome for theworld immediately.
But that's not really why weshould care. I mean, it's it's a
little bit of a reason why, butit's not the main reason. The
main reason is why why we shouldcare about Taiwan is because

(44:19):
we've actually cared about themfrom a national security
perspective in this country fora very long time, long before
the age of computing, longbefore chips were even a thing.
In 1950, Douglas MacArthur,general MacArthur called Taiwan,
foremost, as it was it wascalled at the time, the
unsinkable aircraft carrierbecause of its strategic
geopolitical position in thatregion, where Taiwan is sort of

(44:41):
like the quark that keeps Chinabottled up. If you look at the
map of China and the region, andone of the things I do in the in
the book is I actually rotatethe map, where I put China on
top, looking out down, and andyou immediately see the dilemma
that they face because they'reessentially contained by the US
military bases and our allies inthat region.

(45:02):
So if they look out west, theysee the Korean peninsula with
South Korea and significantnumbers of American troops
there. They look further downand they see Japan, Japanese
islands that have Americanmarines on Okinawa and, all
kinds of military assets that wehave on on the Japanese islands.
Further is Taiwan, which isreally at the center of that

(45:23):
first island chain. And, whichis, you know, they view as an
outpost of America. And furtherdown, you have the Philippines,
where we now once again haveAmerican bases.
Right? So they're basicallyfully contained today. And if
they take Taiwan, they'll beable to project their power
across an entire region. They'llpush us out. Today, that region

(45:44):
is basically a lake for theUnited States Navy that will end
immediately.
As soon as China takes Taiwan,they'll be able to put their
submarines on the other side ofthe, of the island, puts all
sorts of sensors, will make itvery, very dangerous for us to
operate there. They'll kick usback, basically, all the way to
Honolulu. And they'll dominatethat region. Now when I say
dominate, I don't mean thatthey're gonna invade Japan or

(46:06):
Philippines. That's really,really tough to pull off for
anyone.
But they're gonna bully peoplearound in the way that you see
Russia bullying people around intheir neighborhood. Right? So,
you know, you look for exampleat states like Armenia or
Central Asian states, they'rebasically in Russian sphere of
of influence, not because theywant to be, but because they
have no choice. Right? They'resmall power compared to the big

(46:28):
bully that they're next to.
And we're far away. We we can'tdo anything for them. So they
have to accommodate, Russia. Andin the same way, countries like
Japan, South Korea, Philippines,and and others in the region
will have to accommodate Chinaif China becomes a hegemon in
the region. And, they willbecome that hegemon if they take

(46:50):
Taiwan.
And the entire Americanstrategy, of course, for
centuries has been to preventhegemony from developing in all
parts of the globe, butparticularly in Asia. That is
the most important region in theworld. Right? It's 50% of the
world's GDP. Most of theeconomic growth, a lot of our
supply chains are reliant on onthese countries in Asia.
To allow China to dominate Asiagives them enormous amount of

(47:12):
power. So, you know, I basicallybelieve that if China takes
Taiwan, that will give themenormous influence in Asia.
Giving them enormous influencein Asia gives them enormous
influence in the world. And thatmeans that America sort of pulls
back into its own borders. Nowwe are surrounded by 2 oceans,
but that will mean the end ofour our our superpower,

(47:35):
effectively around the worldthat is not just helping the
world in protecting trade routesas we're doing right now, for
example, in the Red Sea, tryingto keep them open against the
threat of Houthi missiles, butit's also about and and
supporting Ukraine against, thethe invasion from Russia.
But but it's also about makingthe world safe for American

(47:59):
goods, for Americans toparticipate in. Right? The rise
of the American superpower isdirectly correlated to the rise
of the US Navy. And the in inthe 1900, Teddy Roosevelt in the
early 1900 sent the the famousfleet, the US Navy fleet around
the world on a circumventiontour to basically announce that

(48:20):
America has arrived, that wewere now a global naval power.
And you see the rise of Americabeing traced directly to to that
to those events and and thedevelopments in our naval
capabilities that allowed us toproject power all over the
world.
Right? And, that will beabsolutely in danger if China

(48:41):
takes Taiwan and dominates Asia.And, that will be the end of the
American century.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (48:46):
You know, it's fascinating, Dimitry. Like
many of us, we're lookingforward to reading the book. And
and as you gather these datapoints of how US Navy played a
key role in establishingAmerican power, you know, there
are a couple of questions thatcome up as you look at the next,
let's say, 12 months. Number 1is we're looking at presidential

(49:06):
elections in the US. The 2candidates are pretty obvious,
Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
And, how will that change notjust global policy but
cybersecurity, which is anintegral part of, you know, the
landscape today? Navy wasimportant once. Today's
cybersecurity is equallyimportant, if not more

(49:27):
important. So, you know, thereare some of our friends who talk
about US should get into theoffensive side of cyber. There
are some who talk about how weshould continue to play
defensive, but

Dmitri Alperovitch (49:37):
Well, we are. We've always been.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (49:39):
Thank you. And there are some who say how
technology can be exported butto select group of countries.
All of these are going to getrolled up into this big
political conundrum startingnext 12 months. How do you see
this playing out?

Dmitri Alperovitch (49:52):
Yeah. So I've I've always believed, you
know, in that phrase that a lotof people talk about that, you
know, you may not be interestedin geopolitics, but geopolitics
is definitely interested in you.And that was also, by the way,
an early decision in CrowdStrikewhen we met with our investors,
potential investors. We we,right off the bat, said, we
believe that you have to choosea side in this fight, that you

(50:14):
can't be sort of an arms dealerto everyone, and even if you're
providing defensivetechnologies. And that we told
our investors, do not count onus ever selling in China,
Russia, well, Iran, North Korea,where you can't sell anyway
because of sanctions.
Right? At the time, there wereno sanctions on Russia in 2011.
And we we said, make sure you'recomfortable with that because we

(50:37):
are gonna be detectingintrusions from the nation
states. We're gonna beattributing them. We're gonna be
calling them out.
We're not gonna be doing anybusiness there. And a lot of
companies did not wanna takethat path. Right? Symantec and
McAfee had business in China,had business in Russia, that I
saw firsthand what what washappening to it as I was putting

(50:57):
out these reports and wasbasically being told, hey,
Dimitry, like, this is reallybad for the stop when I was at
McAfee. So that everyone needsto appreciate that we do have
balkanization taking place, andyou gotta pick a side.
And, you know, for me, wasalways easy. It was always gonna
be the side of this country, theside of America. But you're
right. Any type of conflictthese days has a cyber

(51:18):
dimension. We're seeing it playout in Ukraine where you've got
cyber being an enabler, with,with kinetic capabilities.
They're being launched, reallyby both sides against each
other. And, of course, the mostimpactful cyber attack that had
occurred so far in this war wasthe compromise of Viasat in the
first hours of that conflict,satellite communications

(51:41):
provided to Ukraine. That was anAmerican company, right, that
was not a party to the conflict.Didn't think that they had
anything to do with them. Youknow, Ukraine was just one of
their many customers, butbecause it was one of their many
customers, their, networks werecompromised.
A malicious firmware update wasreleased to the terminals of
many of their customers, mostlyin Ukraine, but but also outside

(52:03):
of Ukraine. And, they had todeal with that issue. So no one
is unimpacted by this. And andcertainly, you know, when it
comes to conflict with China,we're already seeing threat
actors like Volt Typhoon, forexample, that are breaking into
critical infrastructure aroundthis nation, not doing anything
damaging yet, but doingreconnaissance, maybe pre

(52:24):
positioning so that if if,conflict does arrive, they can
do something damaging, trying todeter us from intervening
potentially, maybe delaying usfrom being able to send
resources to the region. Socyber plays a really fundamental
role in all of that.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (52:39):
And, you know, Dimitri, like you
correctly said, we may not beinterested in geopolitics, but
geopolitics is interested inyou. One example that I can
quote is that as a seed stateinvestor, I'd invested in a
company headquartered inUkraine. Majority of the team is
in Ukraine. And, of course, asall of this started to unravel,
we had to deal with thesituation in real time,

(53:01):
relocating the team to parts ofSpain, parts of US.

Dmitri Alperovitch (53:05):
Well, you you were lucky by the way
because yeah. You were luckybecause they closed the borders.
Right? And a lot of peoplecouldn't leave. And, I was
dealing with a case where, afriend of mine asked me to help,
but, you know, he was investedin a cyber company that had also
developers in Ukraine.
And and one of their developersdid something stupid, violated
the curfew, stayed up too late,was arrested, and and was gonna

(53:28):
be sent to the front becauseimmediately, basically, if
you're arrested, you getmobilized and, you know, they're
asking me to help, to at leastmove him into a cyber unit so
that he could leverage theskills. There's no way to get
him out. Once once once you'rein, you're in. But, probably
taking computer nerd and sendinghim to the front, to be, you
know, fodder for artillery wasnot the the the best thing for

(53:51):
him or Ukraine. And, you know,those are the types of things
that you have to deal with,right, when when you're hiring
people there or in a war zonelike that.

Sid Trivedi (54:04):
You know, last last question for me, Dimitri, to to
end things. You know, we wetalked about 4 different
chapters today. We talked aboutDimitri the the the person,
Dimitri the founder, Dimitri theinvestor, and Dimitri the
policymaker. If we were to dothis all over again in a couple
years, what would be the 5thchapter? What's next?

Dmitri Alperovitch (54:22):
I don't know. Look, if I succeed in my
task here of sounding the alarmbells about China and actually
getting us to do what isnecessary to do to that war, I
can I can die peacefully? Right?I mean, that would be an
incredible accomplishment, tohelp, usher in. And, you know,
I'll tell you a quick story,Sid.
And you've seen that email. Ithink I've I've shared it with

(54:44):
you. But as you know, I was oneof the first geopolitical
forecasters to predict thatRussia was gonna invade Ukraine.
I did so in December of 2021,almost 3 months before the start
of that conflict, and I saidthat they were gonna do it
before the end of that winter.Unfortunately, it was proven
right, but I didn't just saythey were gonna do it.
I outlined in a in a long threadon Twitter all the reasons why.

(55:07):
And that thread got a lot ofattention, got a lot of
retweets, got some criticismfrom people saying no way. This
is not gonna happen. But, thewar begins. And sometime later,
I get an email out of the bluefrom an individual I've never
met who is a immigrant fromUkraine to the UK.
And he said that he hadencountered my my threat and did

(55:29):
not know me, was not in thecyber or technology industry,
but got convinced by myarguments and tried to get his
family to leave the countrybased on those arguments. The
family refused, his parentsthere and siblings. They said
this is all propaganda. This isnonsense. There's not gonna be
any war.
And he kept pushing and pushingand pushing. And finally, on

(55:51):
February 15th, right, the warbegins February 24th, he manages
to convince them to go toTurkey. He buys them tickets for
a brief vacation. He said go fora couple of weeks and then
you'll return. They leave.
They don't return because thewar starts. And they lived in
Kharkiv, a city in easternUkraine. They lived on the
outskirts of the city. Theirneighborhood was pretty heavily

(56:12):
shelled by the Russians. Anumber of their neighbors
perished.
And, you know, he wrote me thisfairly emotional email saying
that, you know, their lives mayhave been saved because he
encountered my threat and pushedpushed on them to leave. So, you
know, I've done a lot of thingsin cybersecurity. I don't think
I'll ever have that type ofimpact, in cybersecurity. And

(56:35):
that was, you know, one onefamily, one one individual that
maybe I had a little bit of arole in helping save their
lives. And if if I can play avery small role in helping to
deter a much more disastrous warfor for the entire world and and
for this country With this bookand with the efforts that we're
doing at Silverado, that wouldbe an incredible accomplishment.

Sid Trivedi (56:55):
So maybe the the 5th chapter is Dimitri, the the
travel explorer, something likea chef. There will

Dmitri Alperovitch (57:01):
always be new challenges. There's
something You know, one thing Idon't do is I don't I don't do
any sort of forward careerplanning or the like. I never
found that useful. I know a lotof people do that. I found it
more useful to just look at theopportunities that come your way
and try to recognize when theyappear and grab them.
So that's always been the casefor me. You know, I didn't set
out to be in cybersecurity. Ijust kinda stumbled upon it

(57:23):
because of the hobby that my dadhad, and I saw an opportunity
there. I saw an opportunity tojoin CipherTrust out of college.
I saw an opportunity to startCrowdStrike.
So, you know, those were notplanned things, but they just
popped up. And, you know, Iguess I was lucky enough to grab
them, recognize that theyexisted, grab them.

Sid Trivedi (57:44):
Well, thank you, Dimitri, for joining us on
Inside the Network. For all thelisteners out there, if you
wanna hear more from Dimitri,you can listen to his own
podcast, Geopolitics Decanted.Or, of course, you can buy his
new book, which is now out,World on the Brink. You can get
it on Amazon. Any other ways,Dimitri, that folks should
follow you?

Dmitri Alperovitch (58:03):
You know, on Twitter or x, you know, I'm
dalperovich, my first initialand my last name and yeah listen
on the podcast buy the book alsoif you like the book please
review it if you don't like itdon't review it and, I hope you
enjoy it. Thanks so much.

Ross Haleliuk (58:20):
Thank you.

Sid Trivedi (58:21):
Thank you, Dmitri. Thank you for joining us Inside
the network.

Ross Haleliuk (58:27):
If you like this episode, please leave us a
review and share it with others.

Mahendra Ramsinghani (58:32):
If you really, really liked it and you
have some feedback for us, wrapit on a bottle of Yamazaki and
send it to me first.

Sid Trivedi (58:42):
No. Don't do that. Mahendra gets too many gifts
already. Please reach out byemail or LinkedIn.