George Kurtz

George Kurtz (born October 14, 1970) is an American businessman. He is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity technology company. Prior to establishing CrowdStrike, Kurtz founded Foundstone, a security products and anti-virus software company acquired by McAfee in 2004.^[2] At McAfee, he served as the company's chief technology officer.^[3] Kurtz is co-author of Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions.^[4] Fortune magazine named Kurtz as one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Business in 2024.^[5]

George Kurtz
Kurtz, c. 2016
Born	(1970-10-14) October 14, 1970 (age 54) New Jersey, U.S.[1]
Alma mater	Seton Hall University (BS)
Occupation(s)	President and CEO of CrowdStrike
Spouse	Anna Kurtz
Children	2

In 2024, a software update by CrowdStrike led to a major service disruption affecting Microsoft Windows systems globally.^[3]

Kurtz owns and develops real estate projects in Scottsdale, Arizona, and elsewhere in the southwestern United States.

Kurtz is a FIA Bronze-rated race car driver who has won the Pro-Am class in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the 24 Hours of Spa.^[6][7]

Early life and education

Kurtz grew up in Parsippany–Troy Hills, New Jersey, and attended Parsippany High School.^[8][1] Kurtz shared that he started programming video games on his Commodore when he was in fourth grade. He went on to build bulletin board systems in high school.^[9]

Kurtz received a Bachelor of Science with a major in accounting from the private Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.^[10]

Career

Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young

After college, Kurtz began his career at Price Waterhouse as a CPA.^[11] In 1993, the company made Kurtz one of its first employees in its new security group. Kurtz and his team were hired by corporations to do pen-testing and locate network risk.^[12] Kurtz’ talent at this new concept - penetration testing - led to Price Waterhouse making him a founding employee in the new domain of cybersecurity.^[13]

While at Price Waterhouse, and later, when he joined Ernst & Young, Kurtz developed a number of penetration testing and Internet security protocols still in use today.^[13] After a few years at Ernst & Young, Kurtz left to start his first company, Foundstone^[13]

In 1999, Kurtz co-wrote Hacking Exposed, a book about cybersecurity for network administrators, with Stuart McClure and Joel Scambray. The book sold more than 600,000 copies and was translated into more than 30 languages.^[1]

Foundstone

Kurtz’s company Foundstone was started in 1999.^[13] Frustrated with time-consuming and incomplete vulnerability assessment technologies of the day, Kurtz pioneered vulnerability management, creating both the category and term.^[14][15] Through Foundstone, Kurtz also pioneered the concept of a tech-focused cybersecurity product company with in-house elite cybersecurity services.^[13] Industrial opinion of the day was that product companies couldn’t also offer high-end consulting services.^[13] Foundstone competed against Internet Security Systems which was later acquired by IBM.^[16]

Foundstone also pioneered security training for aspiring as well as experienced security professionals for pen-testing and vulnerability management.^[17] The training was based on Kurtz’s book Hacking Exposed and created a global community of cybersecurity professionals well-versed on the new domain of vulnerability management.^[17] Foundstone’s success was recognized by customers, analysts, and competitors. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2004.^[18][19]

McAfee

In August 2004, Foundstone was acquired for $86 million by McAfee, which appointed Kurtz to be senior vice president and general manager of risk management.^[18][19] In October 2009, McAfee promoted him to chief technology officer and executive vice president.^[20] Six months later, McAfee accidentally disrupted its customers' operations around the world when it pushed out a software update that deleted critical Windows XP system files and caused affected systems to bluescreen and enter a boot loop.^[21] The glitch affected jails, hospitals and universities alongside Intel in the United States. In Australia, it caused 1,100 checkout terminals at the supermarket Coles to crash.^[22] In 2010, Kurtz participated in Operation Aurora, the investigation of a series of cyber attacks against Google and several other companies.^[23] That same year,^[24] an update to McAfee's antivirus definitions sent Windows XP Service Pack 3 into a restart loop, as it removed the Svchost.exe, which Windows uses to share services as a single process. McAFee said the faulty update was later removed from its servers and "We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence." The glitch affected jails, hospitals and universities alongside Intel in the United States. In Australia, it caused 1,100 checkout terminals at the supermarket Coles to crash.^{[25][26][27][28]}

In 2011, he led McAfee's research around the emerging Night Dragon and Shady RAT threats, alongside Dmitri Alperovitch, who was then McAfee's vice president of threat research.^[29][30]

Over time, Kurtz became frustrated that existing security technology functioned slowly and was not, as he perceived it, evolving at the pace of new threats.^[31] On a flight, he watched the passenger seated next to him wait 15 minutes for McAfee software to load on his laptop, an incident he later cited as part of his inspiration for founding CrowdStrike.^[32][1] He resigned from McAfee in October 2011.^[30]

CrowdStrike

In November 2011, Kurtz joined private equity firm Warburg Pincus as an "entrepreneur-in-residence"^[33][34] and began working on his next project, CrowdStrike. The company was founded to sell a new approach to cybersecurity: cloud-based, intelligence-driven, and proactive.^[35] Kurtz observed that cybersecurity as an industry was lacking a platform approach to holistic threat and risk management.^[36] He set out to create cybersecurity's platform, akin to Salesforce in CRM, Workday in HRIS, or ServiceNow in ITSM.^[36] The company developed a "cloud-first" model to reduce the software load on customers' computers, becoming one of the first companies to use this approach.^[37][38] The company also gathers threat intelligence from the “crowd”: hosts and third-party data sources.^[37]

In February 2012, Kurtz, Gregg Marston (former chief financial officer at Foundstone) and Dmitri Alperovitch co-founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California, .^[39][40] Kurtz pitched the idea for the company to Warburg Pincus and secured $25 million in funding.^[9][41]

In 2013, CrowdStrike Falcon was released and the company was listed on the MIT Tech Review's 50 Disruptive Companies list.^[42]

CrowdStrike shifted from anti-malware and antivirus products (McAfee's approach to cybersecurity) to identifying the techniques used by hackers in order to spot threats.^[38][43]

The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices around the globe. It maintains an office in Sunnyvale, California.^[44]

In 2019, CrowdStrike's $612 million initial public offering on the Nasdaq brought the company to a $6.6 billion valuation under Kurtz's leadership.^[45][46] A TechCrunch article described CrowdStrike as redefining company security standards.^[47]

In March 2020, Andrew Nowinski, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co., reported, “CrowdStrike just has the best in-class solution.”^[13] In July 2020, an IDC report named CrowdStrike as the fastest-growing endpoint security software vendor.^[48] A year later, Kurtz ranked on CRN's 2021 Top 100 Executives list.^[49]

In 2023, Kurtz warned of cyber threats from China and criticized Microsoft’s response after Chinese hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft's cloud email service to gain access to the email accounts of U.S. government employees.^[50]

In 2024, CrowdStrike was added to the S&P 500. At just five years after going public, this was the fastest a cybersecurity company had ever been listed on the index.^[12] That same year, Cybercrime Magazine named Kurtz as their "Cybersecurity Person of the Year."^[51]

In July 2024, a software update released by CrowdStrike resulted in a significant service disruption for users of Microsoft Windows, impacting various industries and governmental operations.^[52] The issue, characterized by system instability and unexpected restarts, led to notable economic repercussions.^[53][54] Kurtz issued a public statement, saying that the company would fix the disruption and support affected customers. Microsoft and CrowdStrike collaborated to develop and deploy a fix.^[55] Commentators noted his lack of an apology about the disruption.^[56][57][58]

Real estate holdings

Since 2019, Kurtz has been developing real estate assets across the Southwestern US, aiming to improve residential, commercial, retail, and recreational spaces to promote community wellness and drive regional economic growth.^[59]

The Parque

Kurtz purchased the site of Cracker Jax, an amusement park and driving range in Scottsdale, Arizona, and submitted plans in 2023 to turn the area into “The Parque."^[60] Kurtz received approval to develop a 2-million-square-foot mixed-use campus that will include residential units, an office building, restaurants, retail space, a hotel and a 2-acre green space.^[61]

The Promenade

Kurtz owns The Promenade, a shopping center in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he has made both environmental and visual improvements. The center includes over 600,000 square feet of retail space and is known for its iconic Frank Lloyd Wright spire.^[62]

Racing career

In 2016, Kurtz made his racing debut in the Pirelli World Challenge, driving an Aston Martin Vantage GT4 for TRG-AMR. He remained in the series for the following two years, winning the GTS Am class in 2017 at the wheel of a McLaren 570S GT4.^[63][64] In 2019, the championship was renamed the GT World Challenge America, which Kurtz contested with pro driver Colin Braun in the GT3 category.^[65] The duo finished fifth in the Pro-Am standings. The duo reunited in 2020,^[66][67] when Kurtz made eight podiums, including his first overall win in GT3 machinery at Virginia International Raceway and another victory, to finish as the runner-up of Pro-Am.^[68][69]

In 2021, Kurtz again raced in the GTWC America series but also in prototype cars, competing in a Ligier JS P320 in the IMSA SportsCar Championship's LMP3 category.^[70][71] In that series, he competed solely in the endurance events, winning at Sebring and scoring a class podium at Watkins Glen.^[72] Three missed weekends in the former series dropped Kurtz and Braun to sixth in the drivers' standings, with two class wins.

In 2022, Kurtz remained in both championships, scoring two podiums in IMSA, including third place in class at the 24 Hours of Daytona. In GTWC America, he won ten of 16 races, earning the title in the SRO3 class.^[73][74]

In 2023, Kurtz stepped up to the LMP2 category to compete full-time in the IMSA SCC, driving for his own Crowdstrike team supported by Algarve Pro Racing alongside Ben Hanley, with silver-ranked Nolan Siegel supporting the pair at the endurance rounds.^[75] Kurtz and Hanley won at the season-ending Petit Le Mans and another race, but finished second in the standings, edged out by Paul-Loup Chatin and Ben Keating.^[76] In the Michelin Endurance Trophy, which took into account placings solely within the four endurance races, the Kurtz-Hanley combo came out on top.^[77] Kurtz also made his debut at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where he, Colin Braun, and James Allen won in the LMP2 Pro-Am subclass.^[78][79] Finally, he returned to the GTWC America to defend his title, and although Kurtz only finished third in the SRO3 category he claimed Pro-Am honours, having partnered with Braun throughout the year.^[80] During the 2023–24 winter, Kurtz and Braun raced in the Asian Le Mans Series, where they and young pro Malthe Jakobsen won two races on their way to the championship.^[81]

Following the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, Kurtz withdrew from racing for the season;^[82][83] he returned to motorsport for the 2025 24 Hours of Daytona.^[84]

Record

Complete WeatherTech SportsCar Championship results

(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; results in italics indicate fastest lap)

Year	Team	Class	Make	Engine	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Pos.	Points
2021	CORE Autosport	LMP3	Ligier JS P320	Nissan VK56DE 5.6L V8	DAY 5†	SEB 1	MDO	WGL 2	WGL	ELK	PET 7	11th	968
2022	CORE Autosport	LMP3	Ligier JS P320	Nissan VK56DE 5.6 L V8	DAY 3†	SEB 5	MDO	WGL 2	MOS	ELK	PET 5	17th	921
2023	CrowdStrike Racing by APR	LMP2	Oreca 07	Gibson GK428 V8	DAY 2†	SEB 5	MON 3	WGL 1	ELK 7	IMS 3	PET 1	2nd	1958
2024	CrowdStrike Racing by APR	LMP2	Oreca 07	Gibson GK428 V8	DAY 2	SEB 9	WGL 13	MOS 7	ELK	IMS	ATL
Source:[85]

^† Points only counted towards the Michelin Endurance Cup, and not the overall LMP2 Championship. ^† Points only counted towards the Michelin Endurance Cup, and not the overall LMP3 Championship.

Complete 24 Hours of Daytona results

Year	Team	Co-Drivers	Car	Class	Laps	Pos.	Class Pos.
2021	CORE Autosport	Jon Bennett Colin Braun Matt McMurry	Ligier JS P320	LMP3	737	31st	5th
2022	CORE Autosport	Jon Bennett Colin Braun Niclas Jönsson	Ligier JS P320	LMP3	721	16th	3rd
2023	CrowdStrike Racing by APR	Esteban Gutiérrez Ben Hanley Matt McMurry	Oreca 07	LMP2	761	8th	2nd
2024	CrowdStrike Racing by APR	Colin Braun Malthe Jakobsen Toby Sowery	Oreca 07	LMP2	767	10th	2nd
Source:[85]

24 Hours of Le Mans results

Year	Team	Co-Drivers	Car	Class	Laps	Pos.	Class Pos.
2023	Algarve Pro Racing	James Allen Colin Braun	Oreca 07	LMP2	322	20th	10th
				LMP2 Pro-Am			1st
2024	CrowdStrike Racing by APR	Colin Braun Nicky Catsburg	Oreca 07	LMP2	149	DNF	DNF
				LMP2 Pro-Am
Source:[85]