The Compound and Friends - Crowdstrike and the $250 Billion Opportunity in Cybersecurity

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

In this special episode, Downtown Josh Brown sits down with CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to discuss: AI and the changing landscape of cybersecurity, Google's massive cloud security acquisition, future growth opportunities for CrowdStrike, and more! Sign up for The Compound Newsletter and never miss out: thecompoundnews.com/subscribe Instagram: instagram.com/thecompoundnews Twitter: twitter.com/thecompoundnews LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/ Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Josh. I am here with a very special guest. I'm so excited to be chatting with George Kurtz. George is the president, CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike. This is a leading provider of next generation endpoint protection, threat intelligence and services, what most of us call cybersecurity. George has more than 30 years of experience in the security space.

His prior roles at McAfee include worldwide chief technology officer and GM, as well as EVP of enterprise. Most people know you as the CrowdStrike founder, and you have been there since you founded the CrowdStrike founder and you have been there since you founded the firm in 2011. Yep. Okay that's a lot of titles. So you, I know you're one of the busiest people I know so I really appreciate you coming in doing the show with us and I know our

audience is thrilled to hear from you. It's great to be here. Great to finally be here in person. Yes. And New York is a big market for us. We've got a lot of customers so I'm out getting customers and slipping in a meeting with you. We appreciate that. I want to start with the cybersecurity, let's call it the invest, from my perspective, the investing theme. But from your perspective, the cybersecurity industry, just as like a level set, I think this has been a really good year for, I know it has, for CrowdStrike and for many cybersecurity companies. And of course, that's been the case for the last few years.

Recently we've had stock market volatility, but one of the things that I've noticed is that your stock sort of trades defensively relative to other technology companies, relative to other software companies. Is that the way that you guys within the industry think of cybersecurity as almost like a must have, not a nice to have, and more like a defensive sector relative to some of the more growthy sectors that are now getting hit in the stock market?

Well, when you look at cybersecurity, I think it's like air and water in the hierarchy of needs. You have to have it. Every company has to have it. It's like a staple of the technology sector. It's a must have, right? And obviously, the threats continue to go up. The regulation around security continues to go up.

And whenever you have these geopolitical tensions and sort of heightened geopolitical issues in periods of time, you see more attacks, right? So when we think about cybersecurity, let's go through, we're SaaS, we're enterprise B2B, we're in security, and we've got incredible modes, and we're not subject to tariffs, right? Obviously we've got to deal with companies that are,

but we're not. So I think when people look at that and they look at our growth profile, what we're able to do, they look at the total addressable market and it checks a lot of boxes for investors, right? When you hear Wall Street analysts Talk about this sector lately one of the big themes that continues to come up is that of all of the SaaS plays that are somewhat susceptible to the economy,

yours is probably the most bulletproof. And I just think that it's a reflection of the reality. When a board of directors gets together, even if they're thinking about cost-cutting, even if they're thinking about taking down the IT budget, your line item is probably one of the last to even be considered. That probably makes it easy for you in an environment like this or is it not quite so simple? It's never that easy selling enterprise software, right?

But at the end of the day, you have to look at what are boards talking about? The one or two risks of a board is really security, right? So that's almost every board. So when we think about their risk, obviously there's reputation risk, there's legal risk, there's lots of risks associated with having an issue or a breach. That's not an area that they're gonna cut. In fact, I think it plays into our hands

because boards of directors will say, hey, how do we consolidate? How do we save money in other areas? Can we do more with vendors like CrowdStrike because we can help save them money, consolidate vendors, and give them a better outcome. So that sort of cost cutting plays into our hand, but they're still going to need cybersecurity. Right. This is what the analysts at Wedbush, Morgan, who cover technology, or Wedbush, this is

what they're saying. Cybersecurity names such as Palo Alto, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Checkpoint, and CyberArk will be defensive names where investors can rotate from semis to software to hunker down during this category five storm and likely outperform other subsets of tech. So I think that mentality has, has sank in. And I think another thing that's unique about CrowdStrike is that by now, everyone realizes that you are one of the largest, if not the largest, not only provider in a lot of these areas of cybersecurity, but you're a platform that covers pretty much the entire enterprise.

I was reading in an analyst deck the other day that the typical enterprise has 75 different vendors for different security needs. I would imagine that's one of the biggest opportunities for you guys right now. Absolutely. So when you look at CrowdStrike as, if not the largest, one of the largest, I think we probably are the largest, right? SurePlay security providers, right? We don't have hardware, which is the beauty of our model.

We've always had a SaaS offering, right, and recurring revenue. We didn't have any mixed models that we had to explain the Wall Street as we transitioned. We didn't have any of that. So it's a very clean business. What they call tech debt. Tech debt, right. So you have a lot of companies that have come to market, either they were public, then they went private, then they went private,

then they come back, and they have to retool because they started as legacy technology or on-prem. We started in the cloud, born in the cloud, as a SaaS offering. And our delivery mechanism, software delivery SaaS, but also you have to match it up with the revenue model, which is recurring revenue. We don't have term licenses and things of that nature. So this is really important,

that's why it's such a clean model and a great story for Wall Street because they understand how hard it is to get to where we are. That being said, with 75 different vendors out there, we don't walk into a customer. I have a bunch of meetings this week here in New York. No one says, hey, we want to have more vendors

and we want to have more agents and we want to have more complexity. It's like save us money, give us a better outcome and get rid of a bunch of stuff that we don't need, which fits squarely into what CrowdStrike is all about with our Falcon platform. Yeah, I think people are looking to simplify in general and if they find a vendor that can cover them

across the board, it's obviously going to be the more appealing decision, not just because nobody wants more line items and more vendors, but because all of this stuff has to work together. And stitching things together that don't necessarily talk well with each other is probably a recipe to introduce potential problems. Correct, and we've seen a lot of our competitors

buy things, try to stitch them together, and it doesn't always work. It looks easier on a PowerPoint. We say I've never seen a PowerPoint that was wrong. It all looks good. But to make it work, it's really hard. And I think one of the areas that we've done a really good job, we've done some really nice

acquisitions. Adaptive Shield is one of our latest cloud acquisitions. And it's been on fire because it's so easy to use, and it gives a view of all your SaaS applications and exposures and identities. But when you look at our philosophy, it's always been if we're buying tech and talent, which is typically what we'd like to buy, we don't like to buy a whole bunch of go-to-market. Not saying we won't, but we spend the time and effort to integrate it.

So we've got one clean platform, a single agent, single data architecture, and we make it seamless for our customers. And that's a big part of our success. So when you make an acquisition, it's not necessarily because of who the customers of that company are, and you just want to take over those relationships. A lot of the times it's because

there's an underlying technology that you can build out internally and add to. Correct. And of course the engineers that come along with it hopefully. Team and tech. Okay. And that's what we like. come along with it, hopefully. Team and tech. Okay.

And that's what we like. We like to get them in a certain phase where there's a go-to-market, or there's a product market fit, and you've got the right team. And then we've got such a sales machine and the way the platform works with our cross sale and our net retention rates, we just put it into the machine and it takes off. And that's been a big part of our success. So I want to show you a slide from a recent research report from Stevens. They initiated coverage on the sector or updated their price targets.

Of course, they've got a highly favorable viewpoint on CrowdStrike, but this is something that they wrote about the cybersecurity industry at large. And of course, the most striking thing here is they estimate is currently a $116 billion TAM or total addressable market in cybersecurity. They see that growing at a 21% CAGR over the next five years and hitting 250 billion by the end of this decade. I don't know what your internal projections are about your own total addressable market, but does that strike you as about right or maybe underestimating or what? That's about right. If you look at our investor deck, it looks like that because we're directionally

correct in terms of the current TAM that we participate in today. And then where it's going 250 billion plus, absolutely. And I think the key part of what we look at is, you know, we're a little over 4 billion of annual recurring revenue. So you can do the math on this, right? We still are, there's a lot more to go in terms of penetration. And what we've talked about time and time again is our path to 10 billion, right? So if you look at our overall market penetration, where we are today at 4 getting to 10, you know, we see a path to that.

Four billion at ARR right now? Yeah, 4.2 billion at ARR. Getting to 10 over the next couple of years. So more than a couple of years, right? We've laid it out in our deck. But what's important to realize is when you look at the TAM and the opportunity and you look at our market share,

this huge market out there, and we have a very small piece of it. So that's the way we look at the TAM and the opportunity and you look at our market share, this huge market out there, and we have a very small piece of it. So that's the way we look at it. It's really- Right, so not only is the market growing, but you can also grow your own share Absolutely. within the market,

which is I think what growth investors are looking for. Like that's the general idea is that we want share growers with a pie that's growing also. I wanna quote from the report a little bit further because I think this is important. Steven says they expect continued ongoing shift to more consolidated platforms, which speaks to what we were saying before. Over the course of history in cybersecurity, the pendulum has swung back and forth between best of breed solutions and integrated platforms.

We believe the current trend is that enterprise customers are looking to consolidate around a smaller number of strategic platform providers. So does that mean that you guys will get more pitches from startups and younger companies? You'll hear more ideas to acquire because there is this new preference or growing preference for a more integrated larger platform.

Does that also play into your favor? It does play into our favor. When we think about the markets today, and look, I think everyone would love the IPO markets to open up as investors, right? But- Probably not this year. Not this year, right?

And it's gonna be choppy, and you have a lot of companies that have taken a lot of money, they've taken a lot of secondaries, and they have high valuations. And the investors want out. And the investors want out. So they're stuck in a little bit of no man's land

because at the value, either they're gonna have to take less on the valuations or they're gonna have to get it public. And getting it public is not gonna be so easy. So we look at it as a great opportunity in the market for us. There's lots of great tech and teams that are out there, some smaller, some bigger. We look at companies every week. We've been

very, I think, disciplined in our buying, very focused on good deals and good teams. And we've made it all work and you can see, you know, with some of our acquisitions like in NextGen Sim, that was an acquisition that we did four years ago. It's incredible business for us, grown at 115%. And those are the kind of things that we like. So we're gonna see more and more of those. And I think the investors are going to, as the public markets realign a little bit

in terms of their expectations, there's always a lag, but you're gonna see that flow into the private markets. And there's gonna be, I think, some pretty good deals for us. I wanted to run this quote by you that's about you guys in particular. We believe that CrowdStrike provides investors a rare combination of growth at scale and strong profitability as reflected in its consistent rule of 40 plus performance. Talk about that rule of 40 and just the idea of being able to deliver what

you've delivered for investors so far in your history as a public company and how important you think that is to the investor class that you continue to do that. I think it's incredibly important. So myself and our CFO, we focus on ARR, ARR growth, which is incredibly important. And we also focus on free cash flow. So when you look at a rule of 40, you're looking at your growth rates and your free cash flow rates as well. And, you know, we've always been above 40%. Right.

So that gives you an idea. And we're- Grow the ARR by 40% annually, grow the cash flow? Well, we're growing both. Yeah. I mean, this is the idea, right? But you have to add, I mean, the rule of 40 is adding the free cashflow and the growth together, right?

So you may have 20% growth or 25% growth and then you got your cashflow and, you know, add them together. Right. You've been able to stay in that quadrant. Above 40. Yeah, for a really long time. Yeah, exactly. I'm just saying we look at it on a free cashflow basis.

So when you look at it that way, you've got incredible growth at scale. I mean, we're a $4 billion company. The type of growth that we've seen that just doesn't happen by accident. And when you add the cash flow, we're over a billion dollars of cash flow last fiscal year.

It's incredible. So that's our mantra and what we talk about. And when we get and we talk to investors, it's ARR growth, it's gross margin growth, and it's free cash flow. Is there an industry that is particularly coming up on the radar as an area where they're adding a lot of spend on security? Or is it really just like this across the board, very well diversified base of customers from all different verticals.

What would you say is the current state of things right now? In general, I would say it continues to be well diversified and each company and it's more sort of industry in size, they have different needs, even smaller companies we've done really well in the SMB. But if you look across the board, who are the big drivers of buying security? Well, certainly financial services, technology companies. The folks who have lots to lose, lots of money, they buy a lot of this stuff.

When you get into manufacturing, you have smaller margins and they buy a little bit less, but you've got to work within their budgets. But I think at the end of the day, what we've seen too is in the AI world, every AI workload is going to have within their budgets. But I think at the end of the day, what we've seen too is in the AI world, every AI workload is going to have to be protected. So if you believe in the proliferation of AI workloads, you're going to have to have security attached to it.

This is one of the reasons why we work very closely with Nvidia and being able to help protect those pods and workloads as more and more of those get spun up in the public cloud as well as in private clouds, you're going to need security there. Yeah. I want to ask you more about AI so we could do it right now. Obviously, this is shaping up to be the technology

megatrend of the decade. Obviously, there's been a ton of cutbacks and a lot of money spent on data centers and additional cloud infrastructure and now electricity to be able to fuel all of that activity. How big of an opportunity is that create for CrowdStrike above and beyond what the opportunity set already was? Like when this AI thing started and you saw the emergence of all of the LLMs and then you started seeing CapEx numbers out of companies like Microsoft and Alphabet. Did you say

to yourself, oh my god we're gonna need a bigger boat? Absolutely. When we think about the transition from on-prem into cloud, we actually put in one of our investor decks a couple of years ago, we can get it to you, but it was a one to 10. So for every server that was moved from on-prem into the cloud, it was like 10 cloud workloads. Okay, so just to give you an idea, we think that's gonna be even bigger from an AI perspective.

So you have this like exponential increase of workloads now because of AI, and they're all going to need protection. And we're in the sweet spot of cloud workload protection, among other things that we have. And that's why, again, we're working with all the largest cloud providers. We're working with AI vendors, the hardware vendors, because we're only in the early innings.

You cover it all the time. I think we're just getting the bat out and taking the donut off the thing. That's how early we are. So as that emerges, you're going all the time. I think we're just getting the bat out and taking the donut off the thing. That's how early we are. So as that emerges, you're going to need security. And one of the things that I always talk about, Josh, is that security parallels the slope of the technology curve. So I got into this business in the early 90s,

and it was a website, barely a firewall. It was like routers. And then obviously the curve has gone all the way up to the right. So through that whole period of time, security and security companies, that's why not one security company could do it all, has to meet the needs of the technology as it grows.

So if you believe that technology's gonna keep going up to the right, exponentially, then security's gonna be right along with it. It has to. It has to. So as long as you believe in technology advancements, then security's gonna be right along with it. It has to. It has to. Right, so as long as you believe in technology advancements, then security's a great space to be in.

The bad guys have AI too. What does that mean for Falcon, your flagship platform, and what does that mean for the way that you guys think about building the roadmap going forward? Well, when we think about adversarial AI and its impact, there's two main pieces to that. Number one, and let me just kind of draw out the way we look at the adversary.

So if you imagine a pyramid, at the apex of the pyramid, you have nation state adversary. So that's the most technologically advanced. They've got an army of people and they've got time and money. Government funded. Government funded, right? In the middle of the pyramid, you then have e-crime. So you've got a lot of folks that can make a lot of money, but they're not quite as smart as nation state. And at

the bottom you have hacktivism, all the geopolitical issues that you see that are out there. So what AI, adversarial AI is doing is it's democratizing destruction. You're taking the very smart things that the top of the pyramid can do and now you're bringing it to the masses. There's is it's democratizing destruction. You're taking the very smart things that the top of the pyramid can do, and now you're bringing it to the masses. There's a lot of things you can do with chat GPT that you probably couldn't do on your own, right? Just it whips it up for you.

You're super powering the players in the middle so that they can act more like the players at the top now. Exactly, you're super powering, but you're multiplying them. Oh, you're creating more opportunities and more people that have access to technology. Exactly, because it's so easy to do, right? Oh, you're creating more opportunities and more people that have access to technology. Exactly, because it's so easy to do. So that sort of multiplication is a big area.

The other area is time. Security is really a time-based event. How much time do you have? How do you identify and prevent these things? And you can chart it out over a period of time. And what we found in our global threat report, which is off our website on crowdswike.com, is that the breakout time, meaning if I fish you and you give me your credentials

and I get on your computer, on average last year, last year, it was 62 minutes for me to. So the bad guy only needs 62 minutes to extract what they wanted to extract from whatever they broke into. No, extracting is very quick. It's 62 minutes to move from your computer to really what they want to extract from whatever they broke into. No, extracting is very quick. It's 62 minutes to move from your computer to really what they want, which is- Central.

The central databases and servers and infrastructure. Oh, I see. Okay, right, so the entry point is normally not where they want to go, where they want to go to the internal pieces of the network. Now it's down to 48 minutes. The entry point is like the chink in the armor that gets them into the metal suit. Correct.

And then once they're inside of there, the main goal is obviously the treasure trove of data. The crown jewels, the crown jewels, right. So it went from 62 minutes to 48 minutes, but what we saw is last year, the fastest time was 51 seconds. Meaning someone got onto a computer and in 51 seconds, they pivoted from the computer that they first had entry to,

to another system, 51 seconds. So this gets back to my point with AI. That's AI. Yeah, I mean, you have automation and AI, right, exactly. It's all automated, it's all AI. And that's where it gets scary. It's really compressing the window that the defenders have to protect themselves,

which is why, when I started the company, we're AI native company. It was called machine learning back then, AI, Gen AI wasn't out, but that's what we started. We were using data and we were using algorithms from the beginning, 2011, 2012, to identify and prevent things that have never been seen before without signatures. So we're well versed in this. And I think things like Charlotte AI, which is our agentic AI, is a game changer for customers.

Because guess what? We're now growing more security people. Just like the bad guys are growing more bad actors, we're growing more good security folks. And we're upskilling them. So let's talk about Charlotte. Charlotte AI is like a ride along for security professionals whose businesses are using CrowdStrike

as their endpoint security solution. And Charlotte is able to do what as agentic AI? Is it proactively talking to them and telling them when they need to pay attention to something? Is it solving problems before they even find out about it? What's the big idea there? Yeah, so when you look at agentic AI,

there's a few components. One is you have to basically tell it what's important and what you want it to do, right? Then it has to have decision making and reasoning. Then it has to have a workflow. And then it has to learn from that. And it has to self-learning it better. We do all of that.

And the key piece is that when you look at a, what's called a security operation center, that's like the heart of a big company that you have lots of security folks that are looking at threats and dealing with it, we can do that automatically. We can take that level one sort of analyst that's looking through lots of data, we can do all that automatically.

So we can take something that would take 40 hours and do it in a couple of minutes. And we're routinely returning hours back to our customers, on average 40 hours that we're seeing per SOC per week that we can return back just with our AI technology. But it will do things automatically. Biggest thing is it can sift through all that data automatically and then an analyst could ask questions.

What does it really mean? What are the threat actors? Like a security GPT almost. You can think about it, exactly. It's the best way to put it. With automation, this is the key part. It's not just a chat bot. Now we drive automation in where Charlotte

can actually and automatically take action on your behalf. So you could be sleeping and Charlotte can be taking action and protecting your companies. I wanna ask you about recent acquisition in this space. It's been a while since we've seen a big technology acquisition. I think there's been a political change and maybe a change in the way of thinking at the FTC and so large companies are willing to take risks with announcing big deals again. And Google wasted no time.

They announced an acquisition of a company called whiz, which is privately held. But they managed to sell themselves to Alphabet for 32 billion. Yeah. So really big number. I think it's Alphabet's biggest acquisition ever. And probably one of the largest software acquisitions. Largest venture backed acquisition. And these are Israelis.

Yeah. Okay. Israeli former military. Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. When you saw that deal, what did you say to yourself in terms of like, how much this validates how important this category is becoming? How does the competitive landscape shift when you see a player like Alphabet go that big in security?

Or has this already been happening anyway? I think it's validation of the market. I know the players, I know the people there, you know, I'm happy for them and timing I think was great. It was a little bit before everything started to move around in the markets. And it is validation as I think that the acquisition before that that was the biggest was WhatsApp. So you're talking about a huge acquisition, but really what it does is it validates how important cloud security is, and it validates how strategic it is

for someone like Google. We actually work very closely with Google, so our hope is to continue to work closely with them, and they've got some technology, we've got some, but at the end of the day, we're all focused on customer outcomes. So I think it's gonna be a good acquisition for them, but it does validate the market.

And I think if you looked at our 600 million plus in ARR, we're one or two largest cloud security providers, because we go well beyond endpoint. If you apply to 64X multiple of that, what is that? Right, if you were trading at the same multiple that Wizz was acquired. Just our cloud business. Just the cloud business alone.

Right. Obviously, it would be significant. Exactly. So for me, I think it's, well, I look at it and go, this is fantastic. Validation and really puts security on the map. If security is the largest privately backed venture deal of all time, it tells you how important it is. I agree.

I wanted to ask you about some, sounds like really great news. You guys welcome back an old colleague, Alex Ionescu. Am I pronouncing it right? Yeah, Ionescu. All right. Alex Ionescu was the company's founding chief architect and he was the former vice president

of endpoint engineering at CrowdStrike. I guess this is a week or so ago. Yep. You guys announced that he is returning and he will be what in the organization? So he's our chief technology innovation officer. So he is looking at a variety of things, but a lot of it we would call Horizon 2 and 3.

So you have Horizon 1 products today and tomorrow Horizon 2 and Horizon 3. And a big part of that will be as well working with Microsoft as we think about the next gen architecture of what Microsoft is doing and what we're doing and the collaboration there. So he's an amazing, he's one of the foremost experts, wrote the definitive book on Windows internals

and the kernel itself. And he went off and did some government service for Canada. And he's back now. We're excited to have him back. And we've always been a company focused on innovation. And he was one of our early guys and just an amazing human. And I think great addition back to the team. Very cool.

I wanna ask about, I know you can't speak specifically about earnings or revenue or any projections, but you guys will be reporting this quarter along with every other technology company. You're also a global business, although I know the majority of the revenue is coming from the United States. You're still doing business around the world. You must have a point of view about what's been happening over the last couple of weeks and what that

might mean as technology companies are affected by it. And maybe in some cases, the effect will be small, maybe larger in other cases. But just if you could generally speak to the business environment out there, given your central role in a lot of really critical things. Yeah, sure. So just by revenue, we're 67, 68% North America, what we would call it, right? And then you have the rest of the world. And that is a growing business for us.

So I think one of the areas, obviously, you have to pay attention to is, you know, what's the impact to customers? What does it mean to them? How do they retrench their business? I think there's a lot of companies just trying to figure out, you know, what they do and how they deal with their supply chain. So I think all that be unfolding, but at the end of the day, as we started the conversation, they're still going to need security, right? And it's still going to be important. And I think it might even be more important because when geopolitical tensions

go up, the nation state actors get even more active. So we'll continue to work with them. I think we've been very good in showing them real tangible ROI. And in one of the areas is our Falcon Flex licensing, which really has helped our customers basically commit more to us, but also save more. The more they commit, the bigger the discounts. And then it opens up the entire product portfolio.

So as they sort of figure out what their- So Falcon Flex is like a way that they can access the Falcon platform, but giving- All the modules. All the modules. Okay. Yeah. So it looks like a hyperscaler license and it's something that came out of our customers where they said, hey George, you started a company with one module, you got 29 today.

We want to do more with you. Like, we got to keep buying stuff and go through a procurement, make it easier for us. So we literally sat down with some of our biggest customers and they said, we want to do more with you. Like, we got to keep buying stuff and go through a procurement, make it easier for us. So we literally sat down with some of our biggest customers and they said, we want to commit a certain amount over a three to five year period. We want to then open up the entire product portfolio. We'll pay for what we use, right? But the more we commit, the more discounts we get. And we don't have to go through another procurement cycle.

And it's been a game changer. We started this early 2024 and today we're over 2.2 billion in Falcon Flex licensing. That means when a customer has to make a decision, do I go to procurement, do I do a tender, do I do this, do I do that or do they just go, CrowdStrike has that module, let's activate it and burn down the license we already have. So less RFPs, less bake-offs.

Companies can just say, like, we're in the door with these guys. They have what we need. Exactly. Let's utilize it directly from there. It's an easier yes from everyone involved. It's an easier yes, and the only people that like going through procurement

are the procurement people, right? Yes, I can imagine. So we had our customer advisory board last week that I was at, I was go to and figure out what's going on and get the feedback. And we had a customer basically tell us like, Hey, we were looking at, you know, in this space, what you had in this module.

And he basically was a CIO basically shut down, like going out to RFP, cause he's like, we already have the funds and you already have a great module, like what are we doing? And it was a quick sale. That's terrific. Well, George, I want to say thank you again for joining us and answering my questions. I know I don't live in the inside the cybersecurity world the way that you do. So you're pretty good at it. Okay. This is all super helpful to me as a shareholder and also someone who's investing broadly in tech. So thank you so much for joining us.

Where can people go to continue to follow along as CrowdStrike builds? I know the website has a lot of content there. It's crowdstrike.com. Crowdstrike.com. Okay. That's the best spot. And then from there, you know, we've got obviously

on YouTube, we've got lots of videos that are out there. You can actually see the technology and hear from some of our experts. And more importantly, you can hear from our customers. That's the thing, when you're an investor, in my opinion, you need to hear from the customers. You have case studies up there? Case studies.

What we did, how we did it, and brand names. I mean, these are not like folks you never heard of. These are the biggest brands in the world. So that's- Well, someday we'll have a Red Holtz Wealth Management case study on the CrowdStrike website. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And guys, thank you so much for watching.

Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you soon. you