CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on Racing, Leadership, and Investing in Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team

Where there's an analogy between business and cars is you're always looking for the best performance. Even when you're winning, even when the race is over and you won, you basically complain anyway. You say, 'Well, I didn't like the car. It wasn't good here.' And there's always something better, right? There's always some more performance or something the team could have done better or something you could have done better yourself.

Well, the partnership started in 2018 and we got a call because the Formula 1 team needed some better security. So we supplied the security. They figured out that I was a race fan enthusiast, like to race myself, and Toto found out about it. So we sat down and before IPO he said, 'Well, why don't you do something with us? Why don't you become a small partner?' This is before we IPOed the company, so you know, different size of company and we were managing all of our costs and things of that nature. So we put together a small package and that got us in the game. And the whole premise behind that was we wanted worldwide exposure outside of just North America. Before the IPO, obviously over time the partnership has grown and we've increased our sponsorship and those sort of things, but it really started with the Formula 1 team wanting the best technology to protect them.

When we think about all of the proprietary data and technologies that are in use today, I mean it's all data that really drives the simulations. A lot of the techniques are secret in how things are constructed. If there's a performance advantage somewhere, you want to keep that a secret. So, you have a combination of availability, which is you want to make sure your systems are available on race day because, right, you have to be able to race. Things like ransomware and those sort of things could really impact your day. And then also you have insiders, you know, that you want to keep track of, make sure that people are doing the right thing. And you also have obviously the big one is external parties or threat actors that might be trying to gain access to this sensitive information either through ransom or even extortion. Even if you don't ransom a company, you can basically steal the data and then extort the company so that you don't post that data out there. So those are the kind of things that we protect the team against.