ESW #318 – Mickey Bresman, Dave Merkel, Michaël Lakhal, Ashley Leonard, Jason Rolleston, Eve Maler

Ashley Leonard is the president and CEO of Syxsense-a global leader in Unified Security and Endpoint Management (USEM). Ashley is a technology entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in enterprise software, sales, marketing, and operations, providing critical leadership during the high-growth stages of well-known technology organizations.

Ashley manages U.S., European, and Australian operations in his current role, defines corporate strategies, oversees sales and marketing, and guides product development. Ashley has worked tirelessly to build a robust, innovation-driven culture within the Syxsense team while delivering returns to investors.

He has founded several successful technology companies with global operations, serves on several boards and mentors up-and-coming technology CEOs. Accolades include being named a finalist for Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of The Year” and AeA’s “Outstanding Private Company CEO” Award and won the AGC Innovation CEO Award.

As a product manager and strategist, Michaël has more than 10 years of experience in the Digital Signature market, focusing on B2C transactions for financial services. As Director of Product Management at OneSpan, he leads two product lines: Identity Verification and Authentication to provide an end-to-end digital agreement solution. Prior to joining, Michaël was a senior product manager and senior product marketing manager at DocuSign to expand their offering in EMEA and APAC. Earlier in his career, he joined QuickSign as the first employee to build the first mass-market platform for B2C transactions based on OpenTrust signature engine, focused on onboarding for the financial industry.

Eve Maler is a globally recognized strategist, innovator, and communicator on digital identity, security, privacy, and consent. As an identity and access management pioneer, she has shaped IAM standards and thought leadership for over two decades. In that time she has delivered dozens of mainstage presentations, technical education sessions, and workshops. As CTO of ForgeRock she led its Labs team investigating and prototyping innovative solutions to customers’ challenges. As a Forrester security and risk analyst she advised clients on strategy, industry developments, and best practices for IAM, strong authentication, and API security. Now Eve is on the hunt to take it to the next level.

Jason is an accomplished business executive with experience across multiple technologies and a passion for cybersecurity. He has expertise managing businesses at scale while also developing next generation capabilities for adjacent opportunities. Jason joined VMware in 2021 to lead product management for VMware Carbon Black. Prior to VMware, Jason most recently served as Chief Product Officer at Kenna Security where he lead product management, product marketing, and business development. Prior to Kenna security, he was Vice President for Security Operations Products at McAfee, where he was responsible for McAfee’s security operations products, including SIEM, endpoint detection and response, behavioral analytics, and sandboxing. Prior to that, he served as Head of Product Management for Enterprise Routing at Cisco and held several senior positions at Symantec. He holds a B.S. in applied physics and a masters in engineering management from Cornell University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Mickey began his technical career in the Navy. Mickey’s comfort zone is on the front lines, helping organizations thwart and respond to cyberattacks. The long-time cybersecurity expert and entrepreneur has an extensive track record of driving revenue growth and scaling organizations across the globe.

Prior to co-founding Semperis, Mickey held the position of CTO at YouCC Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Partner integration company. As a cybersecurity thought leader, Mickey has been quoted or featured in many major publications, including Forbes, CNBC, and others. He has a B.A. in Technical Management and a Minor in Electronic Engineering.

Dave Merkel (aka “Merk”) is the co-founder of Expel as well as our Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Dave has been involved in the information security field for nearly 30 years, first as a federal agent pursuing cyber criminals in the era of floppy disks and 2400 baud modems, then as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and vice president of products at Mandiant. Following FireEye’s acquisition of Mandiant, Dave served as the global CTO of FireEye.

Before Dave’s 10 years as a solutions provider, he spent another decade as a security practitioner. He got his start as a special agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, pursuing cyber criminals and conducting digital forensic investigations, and later as head of AOL’s technical security organization. While at AOL, he created and ran the first incident response capability for AOL and Time Warner, managed software security and policy programs, and built technologies for AOL’s security infrastructure.