George Kurtz

Three weeks after a faulty software update caused global disruptions in August, George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike, flew to Las Vegas to apologize at Black Hat, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity conferences. Kurtz’s multiple mea culpas over the past few months seem to have paid off. Many customers and experts still view CrowdStrike as one of the most solid and reputable cybersecurity companies. Its stock, which plummeted after millions of Windows machines crashed with the dreaded “blue screen of death,” has slowly recovered, with analysts betting on a stock comeback. Kurtz, who founded CrowdStrike in 2011, has also reframed the PR debacle as an opportunity: He told a conference audience recently that the outage “helped transform” the company, strengthening its ability to defend against cyberthreats.