George Kurtz (Cybersecurity / Endpoint Security) at CrowdStrike — Austin, United States

George Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011 after serving as CTO of McAfee, bringing cloud-native security and threat intelligence to endpoint protection. CrowdStrike's Falcon platform became the gold standard for endpoint detection and response. The company went public in 2019 and grew to protect over 29,000 organizations. In July 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike update caused one of the largest IT outages in history — affecting 8.5 million Windows systems globally — testing Kurtz's leadership under pressure.