WSJ News Exclusive | Ex-Twitter Cyber Chief Joins Cloud-Security Company Lacework

“When I looked at Lacework, I wanted to see how things work, where they wanted to go and how they felt they were set up,” Mx. Kissner said. “I don’t want to go somewhere that doesn’t need my skills.”

Mountain View, Calif.-based Lacework, valued at $8.3 billion after its last funding round in November 2021, is a key player in the cloud-security sector, with a platform designed to help corporate cyber teams continuously monitor risks and vulnerabilities across their cloud applications.

Cloud security is a growing segment of the cyber market as corporate infrastructure steadily moves to cloud platforms offered by

Amazon’s

AWS, Google,

Microsoft

and others. Lacework competes most directly with Wiz, valued at about $10 billion after a $300 million Series D raise in February, at a time when cyber companies are finding it tougher to find financing. 

With a background in privacy and security, and a doctorate in computer science focused on cryptography, Mx. Kissner has worked at

Apple

and human-resources-technology firm Humu, after spending 12 years at Google in technology and privacy roles.

Most recently, Mx. Kissner had joined Twitter in 2021 as head of privacy engineering and then CISO. They quit in November, two weeks after

Elon Musk

bought the social-media company for $44 billion. On taking over, Mr. Musk immediately fired top executives and made sweeping layoffs while conducting an overhaul that angered many users and remaining employees. 

Joining Lacework “should be less dramatic than the last job,” Mx. Kissner said. 

Lacework, founded in 2015, has spent the past year restructuring after laying off 20% of its workforce in May 2022, one of many cyber services and technology providers that shed staff at the time because of concerns about the economy.

In November, Lacework hired a new chief financial officer, in part to lay groundwork for an initial public offering. A new chief marketing officer also joined. In October,

Jay Parikh

became sole chief executive as the company dissolved a co-CEO structure it used for less than two years. Tech industry veteran David Hatfield had jointly led Lacework with Mr. Parikh.

Mx. Kissner said they aren’t making hiring decisions immediately, though several cybersecurity jobs are listed on Lacework’s website. “My first step is go in and see the lay of land and see what we need and where we can improve and where we’re doing really well,” they said.

Write to Kim S. Nash at kim.nash@wsj.com