Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 1)

Christian convinced the Board of his employer to let him incubate a Cyber Security startup idea as a division of the company with an express intent of spinning it off.

Now, the company has been spun out, doing almost $20M in bootstrapped annual revenue, and may soon find a lucrative Exit. This is a phenomenal story for entrepreneurs considering the Bootstrapping with a Paycheck route.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Christian, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Christian Geyer: Well, I was born and raised in Reston, Virginia. I’m almost what I would consider a homebody. So, I’ve pretty much lived in Reston, Virginia. The only time I left was for college. I’m very centrally focused on family. My business is in Reston, Virginia, just a few miles from my actual childhood home and my current home.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you go to college?

Christian Geyer: Liberty University down in Lynchburg. I did two bachelor’s degrees and my master’s degree from Liberty.

Sramana Mitra: Are those technical degrees in Computer science? Or what’s your degree?

Christian Geyer: No, I actually don’t have a technical background. So, my first bachelor’s degree was in accounting, and then I switched, and I also got a second bachelor’s degree in business administration. Then, I further went to get my MBA.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. What timeframe are we talking, when were you finishing all your educational process? What year?

Christian Geyer: Oh, gosh, I’m dating myself. My first bachelor’s was back in 2006. So I’ve been in the market. I’ve got about 20 years of experience post my first bachelor’s. My second bachelor was probably around 2008. And then my master’s was more recently about six years ago.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So, you were finishing your bachelor’s degrees at the height of the financial crisis essentially?

Christian Geyer: Yes. I was recently in the market during the 2008 crash. Probably, that’s what got me on my journey of business development and the conversion over to business administration. When I had left with my bachelor’s degree in accounting, I was working part-time as a staff accountant, and in the meantime I was flipping and building homes as my primary income.

At that time, real estate was in a boom, and everyone was trying to get into it. There was money to be made. It was lucrative, but then when the collapse in the market happened, it just changed everything, and it reset my focus in life.

Sramana Mitra: So, what was your career between the time when you came out of the bachelor’s programs and went back into your MBA?

Christian Geyer: My first of bout in the professional career was as an accounts payable specialist. I then went up into general ledger and other accounting functions. I’ve got a gaming background. I’ve always sort of fiddled with computers, hardware, software, programming my own software at home. So, in that accounting position, we had an accounting system, cost point. It’s a common accounting software that’s used out there. We had some ghost entries that were sitting within our backend database. So, then I basically was given administrative rights to our accounting system. I went into the backend; I started writing my own scripts and cleaning up that database. That’s what kind of got me on the journey of going into converting into technical background.

So, my next position was after I got my business administration degree, I then converted over to the financial aspects of business. I started using my programming background, from gaming to then build out reporting dashboards. I built a BI platform that allowed all layers of management to see financial performance metrics.

That’s what kind of launched my career. Post becoming a financial analyst, I then easily transitioned into my next position, which was the manager of business analytics for a nonprofit, FFRDC – Federally Funded Research and Development Center. It’s a government sponsored research think tank. I was doing their business analytics, moved up from business analytics to financial planning analysis, using what I built, were forecasting models using programming.

I was crunching lots of sort of incoming numbers from disparate sources of data to then crunch them in a model that I built out. It was populating forecasts of where the market was going, what we expected from performance metrics, and then we were using that to drive business health and business decisions.

Then, I left nonprofit government work to work at a private entity, became the director of finance and strategy over at a family office. We describe family offices as businesses that start up new businesses and they seek to grow them to then exit and sell them off.

Sramana Mitra: Family offices want to invest in venture funds.

Christian Geyer: Yes, exactly. We had our own investments that we were pouring into new acquisitions and new startups. We were also bringing in funds from external investors. We went through Series A, B, and C, and we’re pulling in external funds for all of our various businesses.

Probably the most successful one coming out of it was the Crypsis group.

It’s a cybersecurity incident response company that was sold in 2020 for $260 million to Palo Alto Group. After that, I joined a global software company as their CFO and COO. It’s a software company who’s using my background in software and what I had built over the years to then influence them from an operations perspective. I was helping to direct where the software was going to be focused, where our software development focus was, as well as where our business strategy would land.

Sramana Mitra: It was a financial software firm.

Christian Geyer: No. That software is an information governance software. So it helps identify, and this will play into what I’m doing right now. It’s a software that helps identify sensitive data in a client’s environment. Basically, at large organizations that have tens of thousands of employees; we don’t know what’s actually being saved in their data repositories. So, you would use an information governance software to then scan everyone’s laptops, all the cloud repositories, maybe your on-premise repository, and you would scan it for the presence of sensitive information.

The actual title of individuals that use the software are called records managers. They manage the data records within a business, and their objective is to minimize the footprint of sensitive information. They would use a tool like that to then delete sensitive records or migrate them to an area that they can then encrypt it and secure it. So, it’s a global software company. We were selling to Fortune 500 and global companies all around the world. Governments have us installed there or have that software installed. They’re using that to remediate their sensitive data.

And that brings me to where I am today, which is the founder and CEO of ACTFORE, which was originally a subsidiary of that company. We founded it while I was working at Active Nav, this global software company, and we spun it off last year into its own separate entity.