7 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a CISO
Fortinet, Monday, August 18th, 2025
Last week, I was joined on a Black Hat panel 'To Be or Not to Be... a CISO' by fellow esteemed CISOs, Gursev Kalra from Salesforce, Vercel's Ty Sbano, and host Shubham Mittal from RedHunt Labs to discuss our career progressions.
Afterward, the discussions continued with several people asking for more information and advice. I've distilled that discussion in this blog and hope it will be useful to aspiring or new CISOs.
Take one glance at my LinkedIn profile and you'll see I've stepped into an eclectic mix of roles throughout my career-from serving as an administrator for Unix and firewalls to setting up a managed security service provider (using Fortinet solutions, of course) to holding multiple positions at Fortinet across security engineering, service delivery, product management, product security organizations, and even a short stint in sales (more on that later).