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, with a passion for fostering successful ecosystems and individual empowerment. She has 20 years of experience leading standards such as SAML and User-Managed Access and publishing research in the field, and has also served as a Forrester Research security and risk analyst. As CTO of ForgeRock, she is responsible for the Labs team investigating and prototyping innovative approaches to solving customers’ identity challenges, along with driving ForgeRock’s industry standards leadership.

As Vice President & General Manager for VMware Carbon Black, Jason is responsible for the Security Business Unit at VMware. Jason is an accomplished business executive with experience across multiple technologies and a passion for cyber security. 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 led 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 is CEO and co-founder of Semperis, a leading provider of enterprise identity protection, threat research, and incident response services. Among the top three fastest-growing cybersecurity companies in the U.S., according to Inc. 5000, Semperis is widely recognized to offer the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid directory protection.

Beginning 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 founding Semperis, Mickey was 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.

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.