Dmitri Alperovitch: Building CrowdStrike and defending against nation states

Episode 1 of the Inside the Network Podcast where Sid Trivedi, Ross Haleliuk, and Mahendra Ramsinghani bring you the best founders, operators, and investors building the future of cybersecurity.

There are plenty of great startups solving impactful problems in security. Very few, however, ever grow to achieve the scale of CrowdStrike - a company that has rightfully become a household name in the industry. Today, CrowdStrike has a market cap of over $70 billion, making it one of the world's 300 most valuable companies. In the inaugural episode of ‘Inside the Network,’ we sit down with Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, to discuss his journey before, during, and after building this iconic company. 

Dmitri walks us through his childhood, immigrating from Russia to the US, and the early days of his entrepreneurship journey. He then opens up about some of the hard decisions CrowdStrike had to make to win. He goes on to share his approach to investing in startups today, and what he looks for when evaluating founders and markets.

In addition to investing and supporting founders, Dmitri has also started the policy think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and written a new book - 'World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century'. In the last part of the episode, he discusses the threat China’s current ruling party poses, why US citizens should care about what happens between China and Taiwan, and how to ensure that the US remains the world’s leading power for decades and centuries to come.