U N D E R T H E M I C R O S C O P E
ERIC FOURRIER
GITGUARDIAN CEO
The importance of cybersecurity , awareness and digital hygeine cannot be underestimated in the health sector . With vital information and even lives on the line , investing resources and understanding cybersecurity is imperative . To dive a little into what our quiet tech heroes do behind the scenes , we ‘ go phishing ’ with Eric Fourrier , GitGuardian CEO , who tells us about life inside and outside the office . h
How did you get interested in cybersecurity ?
It just really happened on the fly . I started my career as a Machine Learning engineer or data scientist , whatever title you prefer . I was supposed to implement AI into products and was working with other data scientists . I saw a lot of bad practices from data scientists ; bad stuff in terms of coding style and also coding security . And I was pushed to thinking “ Okay , how can I help my fellow data scientists and software engineers write more secure code ?”
I loved writing code and there ’ s a point in the journey where , as a technical leader , you stop writing code . That took me a few years . It is a tough experience , and many CTOs never succeed at stepping away from that . The farther removed they get from the day-to-day of the
GitGuardian started as a side project just to see how I could use the largest publicly available training database for code , which is GitHub , to try to find vulnerabilities in code . I started with scanning for secrets and it went from there .
What has been your favorite challenge of growing a start-up ?
I will say learning to scale , which for me was also learning to help people learn . As you scale with a lot of people , you still need to help them ramp up , teach them how the company works , our values , how our product works , how we sell our product , our marketing message and really try to scale the learning experience . As we ’ ve grown , I ’ ve gotten further from the process , but still , my favorite part is helping people to learn and get better .
How has your role changed in the growth from 20 to 120 employees ?
Early , as Co-founder and CTO , the C in the title doesn ’ t mean much . You ’ re pushing code , you ’ re the product person , you ’ re the sales engineer , you ’ re doing design , a lot of individual contributor work .
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