Matt Harrigan - 30 Years in CyberSecurity
Matt Harrigan is an American entrepreneur, with a long history in early Internet and cybersecurity. He was responsible for advising the President (Bob Beyster) of SAIC on the purchase of the Internet’s domain name system from the National Science Foundation, which was later sold to Verisign at a $20B valuation. Matt worked on key projects for the company, involving the world trade center association, America’s Cup ‘95 (which was one of the first commercial projects on the Internet - sponsored by Apple) and he single-handedly developed an online version of NTN’s “Survivor” football pooling game, which became wildly popular with millions of fans across the internet.
Post-SAIC, Matt pioneered managed security, starting MCR - the first cybersecurity assessment firm to perform penetration testing on commercial entities. The company boasted clients ranging from international oil companies and telecoms to major players in the banking sector who were under constant attack from foreign entities. Needing a way to more easily and consistently monitor his customer’s security posture in real-time, Matt and the MCR team developed MCR ONE, the first ever managed security service (MSSP), utilizing a combination of Raptor firewalls, shell scripts, and homegrown dashboards. MCR was acquired in the fall of 1999, and Matt accepted the role of Vice President, Internet Services at Winfirst (Western Integrated Networks)
In 2000, Matt was the senior executive in charge of data strategy (Vice President, Internet Services) at Winfirst , the first fiber-to-the-home company, which raised the largest series-A funding in the history of technology ($880M), and pioneered the first residential fiber consumer offering in North America. Winfirst operated a 100Mbps bi-directional ethernet to the home solution, eclipsing all then-current infrastructure providers, and giving the company a more than 80% take-rate on services in geographies that it operated in. The company engaged in several bold strategies, including purchasing residential properties to turn into neighborhood data-centers, and simply hiring all the local regulators at the various regional governments to then operate them.
Winfirst was backed by major investors like Blackstone and JP Morgan, and was eventually sold to SureWest, which is now part of Consolidated Communications. The FTTH network from 2001 is still in operation for regional customers in the Sacramento area.
Post-Winfirst acquisition, Matt rejoined the cybersecurity workforce as Vice President, Consulting at Trustwave, where he helped shaped security in the credit card industry by being a core contributor to PCI-DSS, the governing security and compliance standard for merchants, service providers, processors, and banks. Trustwave was acquired by Singtel for $800M+ in 2015.
More recently, Matt was the founder and CEO of PacketSled (now MixMode), taking the company from inception to seed funding, series-A, and first $2M in ARR. Mixmode recently raised a $45MM Series-B financing round. He is also an active investor, having first money into HUMAN Security (backed by Paladin, Grotech - Acquired by Goldman Sachs) and several other notable startups.
Matt’s work has been covered extensively in the media, including Forbes, Inc Magazine, Computerworld, Network Computing, The Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, and many others.
When he is not building technology, investing in innovative companies, or solving cybersecurity challenges,. Matt enjoys surfing and building hotrods out of classic cars.
