Lacework to accelerate growth with key executive hires
Lacework has announced several key executive additions as the company prepares for the next phase of growth. David “Hat” Hatfield has been appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; former CEO Dan Hubbard takes the helm as Lacework’s Chief Product Officer; renowned security and machine learning researcher Ulfar Erlingsson, PhD. joins as Chief Architect; and industry veteran Mike Staiger has joined as CFO.
Lacework founder and CTO, Vikram Kapoor is taking on an additional role as the founder of a wholly owned Lacework entity, to be revealed at a later date.
Hatfield brings 30 years of executive leadership experience in high growth public and venture backed private technology companies. Between 2013 and 2021, he was President and more recently the Vice-Chairman of Pure Storage, growing it from less than $10M in revenue through a successful IPO to $1.6B in revenue, making it the fastest growing enterprise systems company in history.
Prior to that he played key leadership roles at Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks, from the early stages through IPOs, and participated in one of the largest software mergers in history at the time, of Veritas Software and Symantec Corporation.
“Lacework is building the security company for the public cloud and we believe Hat is the right leader to fully realize its potential,” said Mike Speiser, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures and Lacework board member.
“We believe Lacework is on a trajectory to do for cloud security what Snowflake is doing for cloud data warehousing. We are thrilled to have Hat take the helm as we aggressively expand product development and scale globally.
“We also wish to recognize the important contributions Dan Hubbard has made over the past four years, and we’re excited he will be leading the innovation strategy to deliver the most comprehensive and loved cloud security platform in the market.”
“Lacework is a special company with a fantastic team and an enormous opportunity,” said David Hatfield, newly appointed Lacework CEO. “With tens of thousands of companies and hundreds of billions of dollars shifting away from data centers to the cloud, the attack surface area and software development processes have fundamentally changed, and the legacy approaches for security simply don’t work.
“Lacework was purpose built to secure digital businesses built on dynamic cloud infrastructure. Digital businesses should not have to choose between innovation speed and security. With our leading innovation and customer obsession, Lacework is poised to become the leading security platform of the cloud era.”
Lacework also welcomes Ulfar Erlingsson, PhD, as Chief Architect. Erlingsson brings 25 years of experience leading technology efforts in computer security, privacy, and machine learning.
With over 30 issued U.S. patents, he has authored dozens of influential scientific publications with wide-ranging impact on computer architecture, operating systems, data-parallel processing, as well as computer security and privacy mechanisms.
He is currently chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy, and joins Lacework from Apple, where he led the development of privacy-preserving technologies for machine learning.
Prior to that he held similar positions at Google Brain, led research in cloud security in Google’s infrastructure security team, as well as at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley. Early on, his startup GreenBorder Technologies provided the security foundations of the Chrome web browser.
With hundreds of millions in growth capital, Hatfield as CEO, Erlingsson as Chief Architect, Kapoor building a wholly owned subsidiary, and with industry veteran Mike Staiger as CFO, Lacework is well positioned to lead the cloud security industry and offer its customers the latest innovation, world class customer experience, and be the trusted partner to secure cloud infrastructure and applications for businesses built on the cloud.