HACKING DEMOCRACY

Chris Ahern is the Senior Associate at Strategic Cyber Ventures (SCV). As the Senior Associate, Chris drives the investment process, from deal sourcing and due diligence to funding and takes an active approach towards advising, tracking, managing, and supporting SCV’s portfolio companies.
Prior to joining SCV, Chris attended Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, graduating with his Masters of Business Administration in 2017. During his time at Georgetown, Chris participated in and helped his team win the MBA Global Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC). Chris also led and was one of four students selected to participate in the Georgetown MBA program’s Venture Fellows program where he spent one year working with Lavrock Ventures, an early stage investor in enterprise software and cybersecurity.
Prior to getting his MBA, Chris was a Manager in Ernst & Young’s audit practice. During Chris’ six years at Ernst & Young, he managed several audit projects for a variety of clients in the Washington, D.C. area including several large government contractors and biotechnology companies. Chris graduated from the University of Virginia with a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce with concentrations in Finance and International Business and later went on to earn his Master’s degree in Accounting, also from the University of Virginia.

CEO and Founder of CybrIQ Solutions and Chairman, Advisory Board, CyberGRX

Patrick Gorman is the CEO of CybrIQ Solutions and serves as the Chairman, Advisory Board for CyberGRX, a Third Party Cyber Risk Management platform, and on the Board of Directors for Securonix, the leader in Security Analytics. With 30 years of experience, Gorman has worked in multiple capacities in digital technology leadership, risk management and cybersecurity.

He recently served as the Chief Security Officer (CSO) for Bridgewater Associates, where he was in charge of cyber, physical, and staff security for the world’s largest hedge fund. Mr. Gorman was the Senior Vice President and global Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, where he had global oversight of cyber security policy, technology, management and operations. Previously, he worked at Booz Allen Hamilton as Senior Executive Advisor of Cybersecurity responsible for strategic planning, business development, capability development, marketing and capture management for firm’s government and commercial cyber-portfolio.

His technology and risk background stems from holding the position as Asst. Director of National Intelligence (ADDI) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the U.S. Intelligence Community where is was responsible for IT transformation and cybersecurity for all national intelligence agencies in the US. He served as one the principal parties to set up the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after 9/11, and worked at the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1990s on developing DoD doctrine and capabilities design and development for Network Centric Warfare, Information Operations and Cyberwar programs. Prior to that, Patrick spent over ten years in the United States Air Force as part of The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) in signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and psychological operations with service in the Electronic Security Command, Air Force Intelligence Command, and USAF Special Operations Command.

He holds degrees in government and economics from the University of Maryland, a Masters of Arts in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the George Washington University, executive program in Business Strategy at Harvard Business School, and is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute (Russian and Serbo-Croatian).