About Black Kite

Paul Paget is the Chief Executive Officer of Black Kite.

Shortly after joining in 2019, Paul became the CEO of Black Kite, driving the growth strategy of the company and brand from its early stage into the number one recommended company in the security ratings space. Prior to Black Kite, Paul was Chief Executive Officer of PwnieExpress where he transformed the company into the world’s first SaaS IoT threat detection player. Other past positions include being the Chief Executive Officer of Savant Protection (now part of Digital Guardian/ Fortra) and Core Security Technologies (also part of Fortra). Paul has also served in executive leadership roles with Baltimore Technologies, GTE Cybertrust (now Verizon). Paul holds a B.A. from Bowdoin College.

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Black Kite, Candan Bolukbas is responsible for the technical direction and innovation of Black Kite products. Candan is a digital polymath and certified ethical hacker who fully appreciates the growing threat to digital communications and data accumulation that affect us all. Besides being a certified ethical hacker, he is a certified secure programmer, certified incident handler, and a certified computer hacking forensic investigator.

Candan has a BS degree in Computer Engineering and has vast experience developing security products, performing penetration testing and forensic analysis, and providing cybersecurity training. His certifications include CCNA, CCNP, CHFI, ECSP, MCSA, ECIH, CEH, and LPT. Candan has worked in both the public and private sectors for many years and is a strong supporter of human rights, freedom, and privacy.

Bob has been involved in security for most of his career, initially in physical security as a law enforcement officer. In those years Bob acquired a broad range of expertise and experience in all areas of security, including third-party security, risk assessment, architecture, design, policy development, deployment, incident response and investigation and enterprise solution deployments in areas including intrusion detection, data protection, compliance, and incident reporting and response.

Most recently, he was the Head of PayPal’s Global Third-Party Security & Inspections team, developing the program from the ground up into a state-of-the-art risk management program.

In a previous role as Chief Information Security Officer for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he led the Pennsylvania Information Security Architecture program to win the 2007 award for outstanding achievement in information technology by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO).

Bob has been named a CSO of the Year finalist for the SC Magazine Awards and was nominated as the Information Security Executive of the Year, North America. Additionally, his team was a finalist in the SC Magazine Awards for Best Security Team.

Bob’s certifications include CRISC, CTPRP and OpenFAIR.

As Senior Vice President of Sales, John brings 20+ years of successful sales leadership, dramatically growing early-stage software company’s revenues culminating in acquisitions. He has a passion for launching and scaling sales organizations through the design and implementation of strategies to reach customers. He loves to collaborate with partners and marketing and product development teams to optimize product and market fit, improve close rates, and perfect customer retention and satisfaction.

Prior to Black Kite, John led worldwide sales at Allure Security, another Glasswing Ventures portfolio company, where he helped launch and build a sales organization around the industry’s first beaconing technology that tracked documents whenever they were opened. Other experience includes vice president of sales at Prelert where he led the sales organization until its acquisition by Elastic in 2016.

Chris is a dedicated professional with more than 20 years of experience delivering and leading cybersecurity teams, technology, and business teams in fast-paced, high risk, and highly complex environments. Throughout his career, Chris moved between business, customer, and technical strategy-focused positions. Together these orientations allow him to see management and operational issues from various perspectives.

Chris started at Black Kite as Chief Customer Officer, building the foundation of our customer success organization. Prior to Black Kite, he held the position of CISO at ObserveIT, where he led their cybersecurity and compliance programs until their acquisition by ProofPoint in 2019. In other experiences, Chris built, and managed Cybereason’s Security Service and was Head of Security at Novartis Pharmaceuticals where he managed both operational and information security teams.

As Chief Revenue Officer, Eireann brings more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience. He has a track record of building high-performing sales teams focused on creating revenue growth and exceeding customer expectations.

Prior to becoming CRO at Black Kite, Eireann spent 15 years in various roles at RSA, EMC, and Dell. He most recently served as Vice President of Sales at NetWitness, where he was responsible for their business in the Americas.

Prior to joining EMC, Eireann spent 9 years at Brightwork establishing their US presence and driving sales and marketing in North America. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Eireann began his professional career in government as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

Phil is a 15-year veteran in cybersecurity. He has a strong passion for creating, coaching and mentoring sales teams and driving success.

Phil joined Black Kite in early 2020, most recently from IBM/Resilient where he built out their sales model and sales team. IBM/Resilient was the market leader in the Incident Response space.

Prior to IBM/Resilient, Phil also built successful sales teams at Bradford Networks (Acquired by Fortinet) as well as Appneta, who provided a Network Performance Monitoring Solution. In addition, Phil created the sales team at Network Intelligence (Acquired by EMC)

Prior to joining Black Kite as the North American sales leader, Johnathan led the Canadian, East & Central US districts for RSA Security. Johnathan’s career has been focused on technology sales starting with IT infrastructure & telecommunications then transitioning to front end software applications in the Data, ML/AI and Business Intelligence domains. In the past, Johnathan has been a frequent speaker at industry events and webinars focused on various topics ranging from Sales Leadership to Big Data, IoT and Analytics.

Johnathan has specialized in building and scaling enterprise sales teams with a focus on large and complex sales motions within the Fortune 1000. His teams centralize around a “perpetual discovery” process, placing the customer at the center of every initiative, ensuring successful utilization of leading-edge technologies in customer environments. Johnathan brings 10+ years’ of experience driving profitable business growth through net new client acquisition and retention, with experience across the Americas’ within all industry verticals.

I have helped hundreds of customers and partners navigate complex transformational initiatives leveraging leading-edge technology solutions to execute on their desired business outcomes. Together with my team of highly specialized sales professionals, we focus on building long-term intimate customer relationships focused on outcomes.

As Vice President, Human Resources, Kelly leads Black Kite’s HR function. She is responsible for our talent strategy and oversees our HR operations. Kelly brings with her 15+ years of experience developing innovative talent strategies and programs for marketing, start-up and consulting companies that have global teams. She is passionate about cultivating employee-centric work environments that fuel maximum business impact and creating experiences for employees where they feel excited about and valued for their work and are energized to contribute their best.

Kelly has had diverse experience leading the HR function for companies in earlier start-up phases and served as a strategic HR business partner within larger organizations. Prior to joining Black Kite, Kelly held HR leadership roles at HYCU, SimpliSafe, Allurion Technologies, and Racepoint Global.

Chuck is always searching for a problem that a technology product can solve. Over the past 20 years, he has re-invented product portfolios ranging from legacy hardware product families to cutting edge cloud security solutions.

Prior to Black Kite, Chuck held the position of Director of Product Management for IBM Security SOAR. His work positioned security automation as a centerpiece of the IBM Security software portfolio. Other experiences include launching the Enterprise Security business at Akamai, and work as a Sales Engineer in the telecommunications industry covering Latin American and Asia. Chuck earned a BS in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University.

As Vice President of Public Sector, Tony brings more than 30 years of experience in Federal Government to Black Kite ranging from career Naval Aviator, to legislative affairs liaison to Congress, to The White House. During his tenure, he had extensive experience negotiating with foreign government officials representing U.S. interests abroad, as well as private industry leaders to drive some of the nation’s most complex strategy, policy, and technology issues.

Prior to joining Black Kite, Tony was a Senior Cyber Policy Advisor, Critical and Emerging Technology, in the Office of Secretary of Defense. In that role, he was a member of several National Security Council committees, creating authorities on behalf of the Administration against foreign adversaries threatening U.S. economic and national security interests. Additionally, he coordinated international engagements with allies to design sustained global campaigns targeting state-sponsored malicious actors in order to generate insights, enable defense, and impose costs on adversaries.

As the Chief Research and Intelligence Officer, Dr. Ferhat Dikbiyik and his team of data scientists and engineers provide research around cyber risk assessment, threat actors’ attack vectors, data analysis of cyber incidents, and machine-learning algorithms used in the Black Kite platform for better automation and computation.

Ferhat has 15 years of experience as a researcher in the risk-centered studies space. He received his MS and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis. During his Ph.D., he worked on disaster resiliency on telecom networks and critical infrastructures and later focused on cyber risk. Ferhat was a member of and led national and international projects on disaster risk, including cyber-attacks. He built a successful career in the scientific community with more than 40 papers published in scientific journals or presented at conferences and received more than 1,000 citations for those works.

Ferhat switched his career from academia to startup businesses after holding an Assistant professor position in 2018. Since then, he has been studying the threat actors, hacker mindset, cyber risk, and cyber attacks such as ransomware.

A strategic thought leader with extensive expertise in cybersecurity, Jeffrey Wheatman is regarded foremost as an expert in guiding public sector clients and Fortune 500 companies in connection with their cyber risk management programs. In his current role as Cyber Risk Evangelist at Black Kite, Jeffrey works to get the message out about the business impact of third-party risk and solutions to treat those risks.

Prior to joining Black Kite, Jeffrey was a Vice President in Gartner’s Research and Advisory Group for 15 years, where he worked with clients to build and improve their security programs, assessing risk, focusing on reporting on program status, stakeholder engagement, and bridging the connection between technology and cybersecurity risk. Jeffrey has authored approximately 150 research notes read by more than 6,000 clients. For four years, Jeffrey also served as the Chair of the North America Security and Risk Management Summit, Gartner’s 2nd largest conference with 4000 attendees annually.

Earlier in his career, Jeffrey contributed as Practice Manager, Information Security for Gotham Technology Group, and as a Principal Consultant, Information Security, with ThruPoint, Inc.

Paul is a twenty-year veteran of the cybersecurity market. Paul joined Black Kite in early 2019 and was named CEO shortly thereafter.

Prior to Black Kite, Paul was CEO of Pwnie Express, where he transformed the company into the world’s first SaaS IoT threat detection player. Other past positions include CEO of Savant Protection (now part of Digital Guardian) and CEO of Core Security Technologies.

Paul has also served in executive leadership roles with Baltimore Technologies and GTE (now Verizon) CyberTrust, and was an independent board director for Nitro (acquired by Intel/McAfee in 2011).

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Black Kite, Candan Bolukbas is responsible for the technical direction and innovation of Black Kite products. Candan is a digital polymath and certified ethical hacker who fully appreciates the growing threat to digital communications and data accumulation that affect us all. Besides being a certified ethical hacker, he is a certified secure programmer, certified incident handler, and a certified computer hacking forensic investigator.

Candan has a BS degree in Computer Engineering and has vast experience developing security products, performing penetration testing and forensic analysis, and providing cybersecurity training. His certifications include CCNA, CCNP, CHFI, ECSP, MCSA, ECIH, CEH, and LPT. Candan has worked in both the public and private sectors for many years and is a strong supporter of human rights, freedom, and privacy.

Mohamoud Jibrell is the co-founder of Black Kite. For more than 25 years, Mohamoud is a transformative, strategic business and technology leader with first-hand knowledge of the challenges of cybersecurity and third-party security risk.

Mohamoud has spent his entire career finding unorthodox but highly effective solutions to business problems. Prior to founding Black Kite, Mohamoud was vice president and chief information officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the largest private medical research organizations in the U.S. There, he streamlined and optimized a global IT organization that supported groundbreaking biomedical research including research labs in major 79 universities, implemented innovative technologies like cloud-based business applications, virtualized data center infrastructure and high performance computing clusters while reducing overall IT cost by 25%. Prior, he was the chief technology officer for the Ford Foundation, where he transformed IT operations across 13 countries by consolidating global infrastructure and transitioning critical business applications to cloud/hosted model. He also held IT and business leadership roles at Thermo King Corporation, an Ingersoll-Rand subsidiary, including leading a product group that increased global sales from $3 million to $28 million in three years, while reducing product cost by 32%.

In all of these roles, Mohamoud witnessed the myriad security challenges faced by multinational organizations that work with hundreds, even thousands, of third-party partners that can potentially compromise a company’s cybersecurity posture. This served as his inspiration his journey to entrepreneurship and co-founding Black Kite in 2016. Mohamoud is passionate about mentoring and cultivating emerging leaders. He believes the key to any business’s success is building high-performing teams and developing new leaders. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Trinity College in Hartford, CT.

An accomplished business executive with a proven track record leading software, hardware, SAAS, and consulting/professional service organizations, Dan has built highly productive management teams, engineered dynamic global alliance and partner programs, launched new RTM channel programs, and overseen successful business transformations, from start-ups to global enterprises.

Rick Gordon is an expert on technology investing, business strategy, and early-stage venture development. He is a proven leader with more than 25 years’ experience providing organizations with strategic growth.

Rick serves as a Director at Inova Health System’s Personalized Health Accelerator, the health system’s seed investment organization.

Rick formerly served as founding Managing Partner of MACH37, a cybersecurity market-centric accelerator supported by a community of hundreds of industry leaders who contribute to company development. MACH37 invests in entrepreneurs and helps them develop into thriving cybersecurity companies.

Prior to this role, Rick served as vice president of product management at KEYW Corporation, where he assisted the company in launching a commercially focused cybersecurity product line. Rick was also COO of Lookingglass Cyber Solutions, Inc., where he ran strategic planning and day-to-day operations for this early-stage cyber situational awareness software company. Previously, Rick served as managing director at The Civitas Group, where he was responsible for the commercial strategy business line. Rick was also a founding board member of Invincea (acquired by Sophos in 2017). In these roles, Rick worked with senior private sector and government officials to solve key security challenges, evaluated emerging growth security companies for investment, and was a frequent contributor and speaker on issues such as cloud security, cyber intelligence and security innovation.

Rick was previously CEO of Tovaris, a specialized encryption software development company, and was also a technology investment banker at Bear, Stearns & Co., serving many emerging technology companies and participating in several technology initial public offerings.

Rick served as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy. He received his MBA from The Darden School at the University of Virginia and his BS in Engineering with Merit from the U.S. Naval Academy.

Global leader with a strong track record of driving impressive financial results as a senior executive, Board member, or consultant in multiple industries. Served as COO, CTO, CIO, and CFO for global technology companies. Highly experienced at defining digital strategies to drive new business models, grow revenue, improve margins, and reduce cost. Expert team builder and leader of multi-national and multi-cultural teams that perform. Experience in technology (services, software, and cybersecurity), manufacturing, aerospace/defense, financial services, healthcare, retail, and transportation industries. Hold MS (Software Development and Management), MBA, and BSEE degrees from top universities.

Alpa Inamdar has more than 20 years of experience in leading global financial, insurance, and other large industry teams to develop new revenue streams amid transformations while ensuring governance, continuity, and growth. Combined with her existing partnerships with C-suites, she brings valuable perspectives and connections to the Black Kite team.

“When it comes to third-party cyber risk intelligence, Black Kite is a true trailblazer that’s changing how security is discussed and managed,” said Inamdar. “Through its ability to quantify risk with The FAIR model and present a 360-degree view into an organization’s entire digital ecosystem, Black Kite stands apart from competitors and helps businesses in the industries I’ve worked in make better, smarter decisions. With Black Kite, cybersecurity is no longer just a buzzword – it’s a competitive advantage. I am thrilled to join the Advisory Board and help the team meet record demand in building safer, more resilient digital supply chains.”

J.C. Dodson has 40 years of government and industry experience in advanced technology development and enterprise-wide security risk management. For two decades, he was an executive with BAE Systems focused on business development, strategy, program management, and security – and most recently, spent ten years as their Global Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

“The ability to maintain an effective network operational assurance and surveillance program is essential to understanding vendor risk – but many businesses don’t know where to start with technology,” said Dodson. “Black Kite sets a new standard in leveraging tech to easily operationalize supply chain risk decisions. Its innovative capabilities provide unique, real-time insights into the network’s external attack surface risk and identify critical responses to mitigate those risks. I am proud to join the team as we work to bring this innovation to the many enterprises that need it for faster, smarter decision-making.”