Today, Bugcrowd welcomed Ben Fried, Venture Partner at Rally Ventures and former Chief Information Officer of Google, to the Bugcrowd Advisory Board. Fried brings over 30 years of experience building engineering-centered programs and innovative product portfolios.
“Having Ben join our Advisory Board is a huge win,” shared Bugcrowd Chief Executive Officer Dave Gerry. “We pride ourselves on having the best leaders in the industry on our team who can shape the next chapter of growth for the brand. Ben is ready to tackle this role with his engineering prowess, a people-focused leadership style, and top experience growing IT organizations and we’re honored to have him join as an Advisor.”
This appointment is fresh off the heels of Bugcrowd’s $102 million growth funding round in February and the recent acquisition of Informer, a leading attack surface management provider based in the UK. Ben joins alongside industry heavy hitters such as Jeff Simon, Chief Security Officer at T-Mobile; Prabhath Karanth, SVP, Chief Security and Trust Officer, Greenlight; and David Fairman, CIO & CSO – APAC at Netskope, who was appointed last September. Let’s take some time to get to know Ben!
Meet Ben Fried, former Google CIO
Ben spent 14 years at the technology giant, building its IT organization into one of the best in the world amid a period of hypergrowth for the company. During this time, the Google IT team grew from 290 to nearly 3,000, and he led the creation of numerous enterprise software products for Google’s use, including BeyondCorp. Ben’s approach has always been to put advanced computer science to work to solve the most important and challenging enterprise problems.
As founder and GM of Google Domains, Ben took it from pre-launch to many millions in annual revenue and was responsible for every aspect of the business, including product, marketing, and partnerships.
Prior to Google, he spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley where he designed and built the firm’s e-commerce and intranet architecture and infrastructure, taking it through many successive generations of innovation.
Now at Rally Ventures, Ben takes the wealth of technical and business prowess he’s accumulated to invest exclusively in early-stage business technology companies, focusing on entrepreneurs creating major new markets or those bringing transformative approaches to existing ones.
Q&A with Ben Fried
Why are you joining the Bugcrowd Advisory Board?
I am thrilled to be joining the Bugcrowd Advisory Board, during a time when the company is growing quickly and expanding its reach across the cybersecurity ecosystem. I have spent nearly 30 years working on and leading teams solving security problems, and I’m excited about being able to use those learnings, as well as my experience as a leader at Google during an extended period of hypergrowth, to help Bugcrowd in its mission to unite the collective ingenuity and expertise of hackers and customers to outsmart threat actors.
For professionals aspiring to a career in IT or security leadership, what’s one thing you would tell them?
Computing in general, and security in particular, are fascinating areas full of hard problems. The fields are changing incredibly rapidly, and that’s been true not just for my career, but going much farther back. To have a great career in an area with these dynamics, you need to have a ton of curiosity and a dedication to never stop learning.
What’s the most valuable lesson you learned leading technical teams through growth and innovation?
People do their best work when they’re part of a team that they trust, where they feel safe, where they trust management, and leaders are as open to bad news as to good news, and where they feel that they are growing and developing as professionals.
Welcome to the team, Ben!
