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George Kurtz

Co-Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Crowdstrike

Search every verified George Kurtz interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, has been active in public discussions about AI and cybersecurity. At Harvard Business School's The Leader's Forum in October 2026, he spoke to MBA students about career risk, arguing that leaving a stable job for a startup can be a calculated choice, and that betting on oneself carries a temporary downside but potentially defining upside. He also discussed his approach to building his company, including hiring people he did not know based on referrals and focusing on technology that customers disliked, such as antivirus software. In media appearances and at CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 2026 conference, Kurtz addressed AI safety concerns, describing them as a solvable engineering problem rather than an existential threat. He characterized AI agents as programs that can act non-deterministically, and argued that the security industry must focus on runtime monitoring and guardrails. He introduced the concept of the "agent state" as a new class of adversary, stating that these AI agents are not at the perimeter but are already inside organizations. Kurtz also announced new products, including Falcon Guardian and an agentic security platform developed with Nvidia, and discussed the company's financial results, which he described as a record quarter driven by what he called the "Mythos moment"—the realization that AI adversaries are present and driving increased cybersecurity spending.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I think in general when you look at what the Frontier Labs are doing, it's incredible. You know, all of them, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. They're all doing an incredible job with incredible people. And when we think about AI safety, this is one of the most important topics that we have to talk about today. I mean, you want to create guard rails, you want to create safety, you want to go through the training and make them”

“I think there's a lot of different motivations out there of who wants to do what and slow things down. I think when you look at AI in general, it's been a foundational technology. I mean, it's the greatest sea change that I've seen in my lifetime and certainly my technology career. So you've got to be able to harness it. This isn't in racing. You don't slow things down. You want to have the greatest amount of safety ”

“We were 52% better than the best frontier model in terms of identifying vulnerabilities and issues in our test. The second piece is we were 98% cheaper. So what are customers looking for? They're looking for the best outcome with the best model with the best results.”

“The industry got lucky that they were just cheating on a test. But the piece that they missed and where I really think they drew the wrong conclusion was the defenders didn't have the same AI as the offense. Advanced AI frontier capable AI wasn't in the hands of the defenders and that's the key.”

“The have nots, those are the half. The have nots are I'm thinking like local utilities, hospital systems, hospitals, NOS's like utilities, forget it. I mean, they're running such old software. So, it's the have and the have nots. And I think part of what we want to do and even working with Open AI is how do we help, you know, give a hand up to people who, you know, need it because they don't have all of the security ”

“WELL, WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT THE NUMBERS AND THE QUARTER WE DELIVERED, IT REALLY WAS A QUARTER OF RECORDS. OUR REVENUE, ALMOST 1.5 BILLION ANNUAL RECURRING REVENUE, 300 NET NEW, 333 MILLION, UP 51% YEAR OVER YEAR. OPERATING INCOME 372 MILLION, WHICH WAS UP 46%, AND RECORD FREE CASH FLOW OF 377 MILLION OR 26% OF OF REVENUE. SO UP AND DOWN, WE SAW JUST TREMENDOUS SUCCESS. AND WHAT'S DRIVING THAT IS REALLY WHAT I CALL THE”

Other executives at Crowdstrike

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