Kris Merritt is the founder and President of Vector8, Inc., a cybersecurity company based in Colorado focused on valuing people, first and foremost, internal or external. Kris started Vector8 with the firm belief that the balanced intersection of technology and people creates the best solution for people to do what they do best.

Kris is currently an advisor to many cyber security companies, investors, teams, and individuals. His career in the field has spanned over two decades within the US Government, Corporate America, Silicon Valley, and now his own practice.

Kris got his start in the U.S. Air Force, where he led one of the largest Cyber Security Operations Centers in the world, achieving the status of the U.S. Government’s #1 information assurance organization. With the thought leadership he curated, Kris took a new model for cyber security operations to one of the largest companies in the world at the time – General Electric. There he employed a revolutionary approach to catching cyber threats, serving a third of GE’s P&Ls with a team only 2% the size of the traditional model. Expanding on this highly efficient methodology, Kris built one of the first managed threat hunting solutions (Falcon OverWatch) at CrowdStrike. This elite team routinely discovered nation-state attacks against thousands of organizations across 85% of the world’s countries and was recognized as a pioneer for what became the MDR industry.