Michael is a partner at Blu Venture Investors and serves on the Cyber Investment Committee and Cyber Fund Investment Committee. He is the founder of StoneMill Ventures, which focuses on seed-stage, cyber security investing. He was previously the CISO at Zscaler, a company that has pioneered security-as-a-service. As a member of the founding team of Zscaler, he spent a decade building the research team, driving the security model, and evangelizing the vision, taking the company from stealth mode to IPO. Prior to Zscaler, Michael helped build two other pioneering security startups – SPI Dynamics (acquired by HP) and iDEFENSE (acquired by VeriSign). Additionally, Michael serves as a board member for Attila Security and GreyNoise. He has been granted six patents in cyber security technology. 

 

As an early-stage investor, Michael is motivated by the opportunity to work alongside and mentor driven technologists looking to fundamentally disrupt industries. Having helped build three pioneering security companies and learned a great deal about how to build and, even more importantly, how not to build successful companies, he values the opportunity to share those experiences with entrepreneurs to shorten their learning curve.