HackerOne Appoints Kara Sprague as New CEO

TL; DR: HackerOne recently named Kara Sprague as CEO, effective Nov. 4, 2024. Kara will lead the company in ushering a new era of growth defined by expanded platform capabilities and community. HackerOne also seeks to drive adoption of its offerings in enterprise, commercial, and government markets. We spoke with Kara about the excitement around her new role, her tech journey and career, and how she plans to put her stamp on HackerOne.

HackerOne has a new face on the executive leadership team.

The company, which helps organizations reduce cybersecurity risk by connecting them with a community of expert security researchers, recently announced that it appointed F5’s Chief Product Officer Kara Sprague to be its new CEO. Kara will succeed Marten Mickos who has been with the company since November 2015.

Going forward, Marten will hold a strategic advisory role at HackerOne. As for Kara’s appointment, he had this to say:

“Kara’s outstanding track record in leadership, technology and strategy, combined with her dedication to the betterment of our digital world, makes her the natural leader for HackerOne’s next major stage of growth and success.”

Kara will take on the new role effective Nov. 4, 2024. According to HackerOne, she will be responsible for driving company growth and promoting the adoption of its offerings in enterprise, commercial, and government sectors.

We had the opportunity to speak with Kara Sprague about her new position, expansive career, and goals for HackerOne going forward. Read on for more.

Kara gave us some insight into her career, which spans two decades. Her journey with tech started at MIT where she majored in electrical engineering and computer science.

Fresh out of university, she landed a role at Oracle as a member of its technical staff. But her 13 years as a strategy consultant at McKinsey&Company was the true turning point of her career. She spent most of that time consulting tech, media, and telecommunications companies.

“I had a great experience, seeing companies up and down the stack, from consumer to enterprise, across a bunch of different functions. So it was an excellent path for learning the ins and outs of tech, with both public and private companies,” said Kara.

From there, Kara began working as a general manager with F5, where she has had a position on the executive team for the last seven years. She moved up the ranks and currently serves as F5’s Chief Product Officer with oversight over the company’s entire product portfolio.

Throughout her career, Kara has helped companies grow. That experience and expertise has primed her to take on the new challenges and opportunities at HackerOne.

“I’m excited about this next chapter for a lot of reasons. I’m super excited about the opportunity in front of HackerOne and the mission that we have in terms of empowering the world to build a safer Internet. It’s an incredible and much, much needed mission, and I’m really excited about the opportunity to lead us forward and really take that on,” said Kara.

Kara’s journey with tech has been a long and fruitful one. But her journey with HackerOne has just begun, with decades of experience culminating in this point.

Kara’s years of working in tech have also been marked by one other thing: social impact. Born out of personal experiences, Kara’s dedication to diversity and inclusion has been something she held close for years.

“So I’ve had a huge passion for diversity and tech for a long time, ever since you poke your head up in your engineering classes in college and you realize less than 25% of the folks in the room are women, and you start wondering what’s going on,” said Kara.

While working as a partner at McKinsey & Company, Kara led a pro-bono strategic planning exercise for the nonprofit Girls Who Code. Her years of support eventually led to a board seat with Girls Who Code, where she helped with decision-making.

Girls Who Code’s mission is to achieve gender parity in tech by teaching young women and girls the basics of computer science. Kara worked with the nonprofit to determine its targets and measurements of success and how it can advance its programs to reach its goals.

Kara hopes to carry over her drive for diversity and inclusion to other tech spaces as CEO of HackerOne.

“Going forward, I’m excited about this new appointment in terms of having an ability to drive a large amount of impact and help solve what I think is a huge and important problem for our digital world,” said Kara.

Kara told us she looks forward to continuing the work around encouraging diversity and inclusion in the tech space and bringing more of it into cybersecurity.

Diverse perspectives will become more significant as technology’s impact continues to grow and spread. Customers want human solutions, so companies will have to think and create tech products based on the varied human experience.

“I’m a technology optimist. I believe the most challenging problems in this world are going to require some sort of technology to help solve them. And only when you’re including diverse perspectives from across society are you going after the right problems that we need to focus our energies on,” said Kara.

Cybersecurity is bursting with opportunities. Companies from all industries are becoming more tech-based every day.

“Every company is managing some sort of digital surface area because they’re using digital channels to engage with customers, partners, and employees. The number of vulnerabilities and the ways companies can be attacked are growing daily,” said Kara.

Businesses have so much to secure, as newer technologies emerge. Once before, teams would primarily worry about web application security. But today, they have to worry about safeguarding their APIs, AI/ML solutions, and so on.

Kara told us the digital surface area for companies is expanding. But this development has put HackerOne in a prime position to help build a safer digital world.

“So I see this as a tremendous amount of opportunity because that’s precisely what HackerOne protects. We help companies with our creative and innovative community of ethical security researchers focus resources and energy on finding issues and exploits in their surface area before the bad guys can,” said Kara.

Cybersecurity is needed at every level now, or as Kara explained it, “a full-stack problem.” You can find vulnerabilities at the infrastructure layer, middleware, and the application layer.

“Any company, including web hosting companies, has to be very mindful of cybersecurity because it is now a required table stakes. Every company has to be able to tell their customers why and how they’re going to keep their data and their infrastructure secure,” said Kara.

HackerOne offers a layered security approach with offensive testing for vulnerability detection. It allows users to protect their full stack from the code to the cloud.

Of course, Kara’s role in HackerOne is in very early stages. But she does have objectives on her checklist. Those objectives include expanding platform capabilities and investing in the growth of HackerOne’s community of ethical security researchers.

“Another important focus area for me is continuing to build trust amongst the entire community because without that trust, the platform simply couldn’t be as successful as it is,” said Kara.

From her consulting days to her time at F5, Kara has always prioritized spending time with customers and being intentional about their needs. She expects to do the same at HackerOne.

A critical part of HackerOne’s value proposition is connecting security researchers with businesses. The cybersecurity platform takes on a defense-in-depth approach, which allows it to tackle a variety of issues and be a last line of defense for customers.

Kara said organizations can onboard and deploy various tools and platforms to try to solve different threat vectors. But HackerOne and its security researchers offer a more holistic solution that can adjust to a business’s cybersecurity issues.

“HackerOne brings a group of ethical researchers who are trying to find the holes in your digital surface area before bad people do, using effectively, in many cases, the same information that the bad people do. But the thing is that our researchers tell you about the holes so you can fix them in time,” said Kara.