focus area
Cybersecurity Leadership & Management
A very good hacker is not automatically a good lead. Time and again, technically strong people get promoted and suddenly face responsibility for staff, projects and revenue they were never trained for. That is exactly where I come in: I combine technical depth with real leadership experience and help teams and individuals grow into that role.
What this covers
- Building cybersecurity teams from the ground up (up to ~10 people)
- Mentoring: from operator to lead & management role
- Coaching for leading in a crisis
- Technical depth instead of slide management
- 14 years as an officer, deployment & leadership experience (incl. UN)
- Leading red teaming & incident response engagements
When an operator becomes a leader, two worlds and two sets of expectations often collide. Technical excellence and leadership are not the same thing. The good news is that leadership can be learned. For me that conviction is not theoretical, but the result of fourteen years as an officer, real responsibility in critical situations and deployments as a blue helmet soldier for the United Nations.
To me, leadership is not slide management, it is people. I am deep in the technical side and at the same time approachable and empathetic. Good teams grow from trust, not from hierarchy alone.
I have tested that stance in practice. I founded my own company, HXNWRK, and later, as a shareholder, actively shaped the growth of Laokoon Security. In both I took on leadership roles, built teams from the ground up and carried responsibility, with team sizes of up to around ten people.
My focus today is mentoring and training cyber experts who are growing from a purely technical role into a lead or management position. That includes coaching for something rarely trained: leading in a crisis, when time is short and the decisions count.
What sets me apart is the combination of genuine technical depth and genuine leadership experience, from red teaming and incident response engagements as much as from the military. I know what I am talking about when it comes to working in a team, and I know what a team needs to stay capable when it counts.