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Today, the Cyberbit team welcomes Brian Pierce as the new Chief Executive Officer!
With over 35 years of experience in the software industry, Brian brings a unique blend of technical expertise, business acuity, and visionary leadership.
In this article, I am excited to introduce you to our Brian, the human behind the title.
Brian’s journey has been anything but conventional.
Moving away from the traditional career path of prestigious university degrees, Brian charted his own path from teaching himself programming languages in the early days of Xerox Systems to becoming a sales engineer and then an executive.
Over the decades, he’s built and scaled companies, sold three, and acquired 35. One of his proudest achievements, he told me, was selling Rogue Wave Software: “It made my investors and employees money. That made me feel good.”
Brian’s fascination with technology runs deep. “It all just felt easy to me,” he explained, recalling programming on a TRS-80 in high school. That natural connection with technology became the thread weaving through his entire career, from Xerox to TIBCO to Rogue Wave, and today, to Cyberbit.
After selling Rogue Wave in 2019, Brian shifted gears. He spent his time as an advisor, board member, and partner at Charlesbank, swearing off a return to full-time operations. So, what changed?
“I’ve always told them I was not going to go back to being a full-time operator,” he said. “But this opportunity really spoke to me.”
The combination of people and technology is why leading Cyberbit was an opportunity hard to resist. “When I looked at Cyberbit, I saw a great technology and great people in the business. I felt like this spoke to my skill set of coming in and getting us to the next level. That’s what made me change my mind.”
Though the cybersecurity training and readiness space is new terrain for Brian, he sees it as a natural extension of his past work in code security. “Clearly, the technology is a leader in this space. That was the technology whisperer for me.”
Brian’s approach is pragmatic yet ambitious. He views the Cyberbit platform as a powerful foundation for delivering mission-critical skills and experience, but believes we can go even further!
“When I look at the technology and the platform and the content generation, the question is: how do we deliver even more content faster and ensure we’re meeting customers’ needs? In some ways, we’ve hit the mark; in others, we haven’t. My vision is to get our product more aligned with what the industry wants and what creates the most value.”
The cybersecurity “big picture” and the inevitability of consolidation
Zooming out for a bit, it’s important to take a second to look at the elephant in the room right in the eye! The cybersecurity industry is crowded, fragmented, and ripe for consolidation.
Brian didn’t mince words: “I think it’s inevitable. There are clearly a couple of large players out there that, even though they don’t have the best technology, they have leapfrogged in terms of industry presence. So yes, there has to be consolidation in this space.”
Going above and beyond on the product side is all great, but there is something deeper we need to address here.
Brian sees a fundamental rebranding challenge in the cyber readiness space. Too often, training and readiness are dismissed as optional. “When budgets get cut, people say, ‘Oh, it’s just training.’ But I view this as just as important as the other tools, if not more important. Because at the end of the day, hackers are just going to get better and better, quite often circumventing any tool and any automated security system. It comes down to people.”
And I want to bring this article to a conclusion with these words from Brian, which truly resonated with me and I’m sure will resonate with every other professional in our space:
On behalf of everyone in the Cyberbit team, I extend a warm welcome to our new head of the organization. Can’t wait to see everything the future has in store for us!