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Secret Service, Wiz & The Money That Was For His Son | Steve Ward, BrightMind

June 04, 2026

Steve Ward has been a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, a Secret Service agent who ran one of the first computer-network wiretaps in U.S. history, the CISO of Home Depot, a partner at Insight Partners, and an early backer of Wiz,  Abnormal and a dozen others . Today he runs his own cyber venture fund, Bright Mind — named after his son.  But this isn’t a victory lap. Steve talks openly about the engine underneath all of it: a relentless feeling that he doesn’t belong and doesn’t deserve what he’s ac...

Niv Braun (CEO, Noma Security): Winning Mentality, $100M Series B, and the Hidden Cost of Building Fast

May 27, 2026

Niv is the co-founder and CEO of Noma Security. He raised a $100M Series B and scaled from 20 to 100 employees in a year, as a first-time founder, in cybersecurity, in the middle of a war that started the day Noma launched. In this conversation, Niv talks about what it actually takes to win: the four-day POC sprint with no product, the candidate they signed three days after he'd already signed with a competitor, the customers he turned away because the feature didn't justify a company, and th...

Raj (CEO, Jetstream): Two Traffic Lights to $34M — and Why CrowdStrike Funded the Founder Who Left

May 20, 2026

Raj grew up in a town in India with two traffic lights. He's now the CEO of Jetstream, a cybersecurity startup he founded after leaving CrowdStrike, which then turned around and invested in his company. In this conversation: his mother's anything less than #1 pressure, the failures behind the successes (a WhatsApp competitor he didn't build, Cylance's missteps), the July 19th CrowdStrike outage and what it taught him about leadership, why he believes older founders have the real edge, and the...