First Security Hire: Building a security roadmap and team from scratch
With more early-stage companies looking to invest in building a security program and a culture of cybersecurity, we speak to industry experts who have been on this professional journey. We have a panel of seasoned security professionals, who will share their experience as the first security hire in a growing technology company. The goal of this panel is to have organic conversation around the wins and challenges they have faced when growing this security program.
Meet our Panel:
Tom Alcock
Partner and Founder, Code Red Partners
Tom has spent over 12 years in technical recruiting and consulting across Europe and North America. He is passionate about cybersecurity, diversity and inclusivity hiring. I am an experienced and passionate professional, who is keen to share the experiences of seasoned industry professionals.
Reed Loden
Vice President of Security at Teleport, a technology company that helps organizations securely access their infrastructure.
He is an information security expert, researcher, hacker, and developer. Reed brings over 15+ years of security experience to his role at Teleport where he is charged with protecting the company’s products and services. Prior to joining Teleport, Reed worked to secure companies including HackerOne, Lookout Mobile Security, Palantir Technologies, and Mozilla, in addition to his many security consulting roles. He regularly presents on security best practices and enjoys contributing to and securing open source projects. He is the President and Lead Organizer for Security BSides San Francisco. Reed studied Computer Science at Mississippi State University.
Coleen Coolidge
CISO in San Francisco, most recently serving as the CISO of Segment and Twilio for several years.
Within the Bay Area SaaS community, she’s known for building mature and holistic security programs from scratch to protect customer data. Coleen is also very active on the speaker circuit and has been the keynote speaker for multiple security conferences. She has also held security-leadership positions at more traditional enterprise companies like First American Title and CoreLogic. Her goal used to be to create a comprehensive and fully integrated security program where everyone in the company behaved like a security owner. Now her goal is easy-button security for all: automate and/or self-service as much as possible, so teams can concentrate on higher-order challenges, or just relax and have a happy life.
Kevin Hanaford
Kevin is the Head of Security Engineering at Discord, a company focused on helping people build belonging.
Kevin is responsible for building and fostering a highly effective Security team and security-conscious Engineering organization. He brings over a decade of experience securing highly visible cloud-based services and has spent time leading Security teams at Cruise, Salesforce, Remitly, and Amazon and Incident Management teams at PayPal, Bungie, and Microsoft.
Mike McBryde
Mike McBryde is a seasoned security leader and Senior Staff level IC with 17 years of industry experience in early- & late-stage tech startups, public companies, and consulting.
He is currently the Head of Security of Temporal Technologies, where he was the first security hire. Over the last 2 years he has scaled the security roadmap and team from scratch. He comes from an AppSec background; prior to Temporal he started and grew software security teams at DigitalOcean, NetSuite, and The Advisory Board Company, helped run an AppSecUSA or two, and helped restart the OWASP DC Chapter.
