Collaboration and community are important to me as I tackle any goal; whether it’s organizing dozens of visitors for the family holidays or helping a customer CISO solve an urgent business challenge. Throughout my years in the security industry, this mentality has led to a number of close relationships I maintain today across investors, partners, customers and our employees. As KSOC builds momentum to help organizations automate security for Kubernetes environments, I’m looking for more obsessively collaborative leaders to help us serve customers.
Accordingly, today I’m pleased to announce Jason Pitzen as KSOC’s New Vice President of Sales. He will lead our go-to-market efforts, including all Sales and Customer Success functions. Jason began at KSOC in November 2022, and he reports to me.
Before KSOC, Jason served as Vice President of Customer Success at Brinqa, a risk-based security management platform, where he led all aspects of Customer Success including customer onboarding, renewals and customer growth. Before Brinqa, Jason spent more than eight years at the crowdsourced security firm Bugcrowd, where he was officially the second employee and scaled the Sales and Customer Success organizations. Jason also previously worked at the cloud risk and threat detection firm Rapid7 as a sales leader within the company’s Boston, Amsterdam and London offices.
Rather than my telling you all about Jason, let’s hear from him directly as I toss him a few questions:
Thanks for welcoming me here, Brooke. I’m excited to join you, Jimmy and the rest of the team.
My career story revolves around accepting help when I need it and lending that support back to others, especially under challenging conditions. I went to college in the Midwest and then immediately moved to Boston, where I had few people connections and even fewer resources to get by. I sold office supplies door-to-door in Greater Boston and Cape Cod until I got my big break working for you, Brooke, as a sales rep at Rapid7. Your mentorship helped me recognize my potential for impact, and that motivated me to show up 100% for our customers.
Since then, I’ve held a number of Sales leadership positions where I’ve grown teams and the ecosystems we engage with – from OWASP meetups to lunches with our engineering teammates to honest business reviews with customers. I like to learn at a fast pace, and with security needs ever-evolving, there is always something new to learn and help our “teammates” problem-solve together. Whether you’re a customer, investor, or employee at KSOC; I’ll view you as my teammate.
Like I said, I like learning at a fast pace. I’m a huge fan of the podcast Stuff You Should Know because I like to know how things are built and how they work. Security practitioners, developers and other tech leaders tend to be similar in nature. They’re curious and relentless about problem solving. Now that organizations increasingly operate in the cloud, these are the teams keeping their businesses running and growing.
The offensive side of security has always been very interesting to me in particular, and it’s not going to stop evolving or expanding. As we learn about all the ways attackers can disrupt businesses and society at large, there is real satisfaction to being a part of a strong defense team.
You and I have worked together at both Rapid7 and Bugcrowd, where you oversaw business needs from new customer acquisition to team hiring and training to working with Product and Marketing on our Go-To-Market strategy. What would you say is special about our teamwork to date?
You and I are both intent on customer success above anything else, and we bring that advocacy into every decision we make. When speaking with our partners or technology teams, you and I like to educate others on our customer needs and careabouts so we can make the most informed decisions as one team. Following your influence over the years, I similarly coach Sales and non-Sales teammates to have this customer-first mindset. As a result, our customers feel confident that we’re advocating for their business needs at every step.
Well first, security problem-solving is easier said than done. My years of experience in understanding the community side of the security industry helps me relate to and understand our customers’ issues, both technically and organizationally. That understanding helps us approach customers’ challenges in a more thorough way and, ultimately, help set customers up for sustainable business success.
My vision is to help KSOC customers not only implement and automate so that Security and DevOps teams can spend their time on higher value tasks and avoid system downtime – but we’ll also help strengthen customers’ relationships across those internal teams in favor of business outcomes. We’re going to help facilitate discussion and action toward customers’ highest organizational goals.
Cybersecurity for business continuity has become a board-level concern, and today’s Security, DevOps and other technology teams have to collaborate in new ways as their organizations become cloud-first and architectured with complex containerization. Such environments are fast moving, critical areas for cross-team visibility.
Security teams are typically overwhelmed with alerts and findings that don’t tie into a larger contextual picture, so important threat detections may go overlooked. Similarly, DevOps teams have their own goals and timelines that don’t always correspond with Security team operations. KSOC and our platform are here to facilitate greater collaboration towards reducing risk, improving system uptime and helping management more easily point to an ROI of their security spend. Ultimately, this is among the best ways to help improve any customers’ operations.
Thanks, Jason; we’re glad to welcome you here. Readers, please join me in welcoming Jason to the KSOC leadership team!