Why We Invested: Blackwell Security

Cybersecurity Made for Healthcare

Blackwell Security is a provider of specialized cybersecurity solutions tailored to healthcare organizations, so they can reduce risk, maintain compliance and build a secure continuum of care. The company recently announced a $13M round of funding, co-led by Rally Ventures and General Catalyst.

As part of the announcement, Blackwell appointed cyber security expert and business leader Geyer Jones as its first CEO. He previously served as COO of Cylera, a healthcare IoT cybersecurity company, and also as Chief Strategy Officer at RSA. Geyer joins the Blackwell founders Jaclyn Miller, President and COO, and Jason Lee, CIO.

Below is a short Q&A with Geyer, where he talks about healthcare’s unique cybersecurity challenges, his leadership style and his favorite podcasts. Welcome to the portfolio, Blackwell Security!

1. What is Blackwell Security and what core problem does it solve?

I started my cybersecurity career back in the late 90s at a company called Riptech (acquired by Symantec in 2002), which was one of the first managed security companies. While many things have changed over the past 20 years, this job gave me my first exposure to helping customers find different solutions to address their security challenges.

The healthcare industry faces unique cybersecurity challenges, including a complex regulatory environment, extended supply chain, legacy systems and protocols that aren’t designed with security in mind. It’s a challenging attack surface to monitor, secure and patch. Our core focus at Blackwell is threat detection and response with solutions that are tailored to healthcare systems.

At Riptech, as one of the first Managed Security Service Providers, we had to build everything on our own: threat detection, response, customer experience and the operational aspects. Now, there are a lot of best-of-breed products and the focus has moved to tech-enabled services. We take a “manage in place” philosophy, leveraging the cybersecurity investments companies have already made so they get more value from their existing solutions. Blackwell leverages a combination of proprietary technology, operational processes and AI enabled response to complement best-of-breed products, which minimizes gaps and blind spots across the attack surface and provides comprehensive threat detection and response so they’re getting full protection.

2. Is the problem you’re solving accelerating in terms of its scale?

Absolutely. A big event that elevated cybersecurity to the Board of Directors across the F1000 was the 2013 Target data breach, which exposed 40 million credit and debit card records. The breach highlighted vulnerabilities in Target’s systems and ushered in new awareness of cybersecurity threats and changes that needed to be made.

The recent Change Healthcare and Ascension breaches have had a similar effect of driving awareness around ransomware attacks specifically in the healthcare industry and the ripple effects they create across hospitals, clinics and pharmacies. The attacks impact patient care, revenue, operations and supply chains.

Healthcare is a target rich environment with valuable data, and we will only see cyber threats and ransomware attacks increase. After the Target breach, Target’s earnings fell 46% because people weren’t confident their data was safe. If people doubt the security of their healthcare information, they may avoid seeking the care and treatment they need.

3. The Blackwell Security team has decades of experience in cybersecurity and a deep knowledge of healthcare’s security needs. What are some of the biggest learnings you’re bringing forward into Blackwell?

The main learnings I want to bring into Blackwell are around leadership philosophy and building teams. I want to build a culture of shared knowledge and grow leaders from inside the company.

I look to foster open and transparent communication, which enables continued learning and better decision making. A learn, teach, learn ethos helps to develop the team and leaders we need for where we are going. Combined with a true north decision making where critical decisions take into consideration the customer, employee and shareholder, as well as short and long term implications to select the best course of action. Collectively, these create an innovative environment empowering leaders and individuals to take chances to help us move beyond the limits of incremental change.

I believe in incorporating many different perspectives and testing different concepts as a way to have more confidence in the paths we ultimately choose. Success comes from the willingness to test assumptions and ask for feedback. However, you will hit the point where you need to make a decision, oftentimes with only limited information. The hard part is knowing when it’s the right time to make a decision and which decisions are more permanent.

I like the one-way vs two-way door decision-making model by Jeff Bezos. Basically, one-way door decisions are hard to reverse while two-way door decisions are more flexible and allow you to come back and iterate.

4. What are your top priorities now that you’re funded?

We’ve largely been focused on developing the core capabilities of the Blackwell platform, which includes the formulation of the tech stack and AI for threat detection and response and building the proprietary portal to optimize for transparency and the customer experience. This will be a consistent investment over the next few years as we seek to continually improve and build an offering that meets the ever evolving threats faced by the healthcare industry.

Our second big focus is scaling GTM, which includes developing our offerings, refining our customer position, working closely with early adopters and building out the GTM team.

5. What are your favorite podcasts and books on entrepreneurship?

I like the Security Voices podcast, which just wrapped up, but you can still stream old episodes. How I Built This is great for fun stories of entrepreneurship and the different struggles people face. Another great podcast is The PE Funcast, which is created by the ParkerGale team and focuses on the operational aspects of building a company.

My go-to books are Zero to One by Peter Thiel, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.