CrowdStrike’s former CTO on cyber rivalries and how automation can undermine security for early-stage startups

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Crowdstrike co-founder and former CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, to talk about the evolving cybersecurity landscape, the role of startups, and why he says we’re living in a World on the Brink. Listen to the full episode to hear about: What early-stage secure-by-design startup founders are missing when it comes to maintaining security while building quickly and crisis management. How AI export controls and global rivalries are reshaping innovation. What investors are really looking for when backing cybersecurity startups today. Equity will be back Friday with a behind-the-scenes look at TC Sessions: AI, so don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:16.1	I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.
0:22.3	With the $50 billion Chinese AI market, potentially slipping out of reach for U.S. chipmakers like
0:27.1	NVIDIA and with cyber threats escalating from state actors and criminal groups alike,
0:31.5	it's a strong reminder of just how connected tech and geopolitics really are. If you understand that better than today's guest, Dmitri El
0:37.6	Paravich, co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, bestselling author, and chairman of the
0:42.3	Silverado Policy Accelerator. Dmitri, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me.
0:47.2	Really appreciate you being here. I don't know if we have time to go over all of your
0:50.5	accolades and your entire pedigree, But I'd love to hear a little bit about
0:54.2	you starting CrowdStrike and working there until what was at 2020. Yeah, I've been in
0:59.5	cybersecurity industry, really my entire life. I started company with my dad when I was still
1:04.0	in high school, focused on cryptography, the emerging field of encryption, study in college.
1:10.5	CrowdStrike really came out of an investigation
1:13.2	I had done. I was an executive at a company called McAfee, which was at the time one of the biggest
1:18.2	cybersecurity firms. And in January of 2010, I worked together with Google, who had been
1:24.4	compromised by the Chinese nation-state operators at the time, and I investigated
1:29.8	that operation, realized that there were many other victims that were involved in that intrusion,
1:34.8	and they were focused on stealing intellectual property from these companies that they were
1:38.8	also going after at Google specifically email accounts of dissidents, Tibetan dissidents and others that the Chinese
1:45.6	wanted to surveil. But this was really the first time that the public had learned that
1:50.5	nation state hackers were not just targeting governments that were not just engaged in traditional
1:55.3	espionage. They were also stealing massive amounts of intellectual property. And then over
	...

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