About
Clara is a Portland, Oregon native, and spent two years during high school living in Dalian (大连), China. She joined ZeroFox in 2013 as its 10th employee, grew it from an early-stage US-based cybersecurity startup into a $100M+ publicly traded global company, and then led it through a private equity re-privatization. Her expertise spans business intelligence and data systems, mergers & acquisitions and post-acquisition integration, cross-functional leadership in high-growth environments, and building high-performing global threat intelligence teams. Clara holds a BS from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, is writing her first book, and is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Sessions
Systems Under Pressure: Scaling from Local Startup to Global Customer Base (Through and Beyond the Global Pandemic)
What you will learn:
Clara Gustafson joined as employee #10 and helped grow the company into a $100M+ global cybersecurity leader — through 6 acquisitions, a go public process, and later a re-privatization. Along the way, she built a culture of excellence through hypergrowth, ownership change, and a shift from serving a few engineers and customers to empowering 100+ analysts and thousands of customers worldwide. She'll share a practical playbook for scaling local teams into globally resilient ones, M&A-proofing data and systems, and building threat intelligence operations that hold up through new threats (pandemic) and natural growth alike.