When we launched the Ballistic X Pursuit Cyber Fellows Program, the foundation was already strong. A clear mission, a visionary funding partner in Ballistic Ventures, and a bold belief that the cybersecurity industry's talent gap could be closed by investing in people who had been overlooked. Jake Seid, General Partner at Ballistic Ventures, put it plainly: "Ballistic is invested in cultivating future leaders with a broad understanding of the technical and contextual challenges facing the cyber industry."
What that page captures is the beginning. This post is about what came next.
From the start, we knew that designing a strong cybersecurity program required more than a curriculum. It required practitioners. People who were living inside the field's real challenges and could tell us, candidly, what junior talent actually needed to know to succeed.
That conviction led us to build the CISO Council, an advisory body of senior security leaders who would help shape the program from the inside out.
The founding members brought extraordinary depth. Julie Tsai, Board Member of the Bay Area CISO Council. Gregory Crabb, Founder and Principal Cybersecurity Consultant at 10-8 LLC. Sangram Dash from Sisense. Henry Jiang, Chief Information Security Officer at Therapy Brands. These were practitioners, not just patrons. They came to early sessions with real opinions about certifications, about what made junior hires stand out, about the tension between theoretical knowledge and hands-on skill. They pushed us. And that friction was generative.
None of it would have been possible without the thought partnership and connective work of Ballistic Ventures' Jake Seid, David Hahn, and Michelle Kincaid, who opened doors and paved the way for the program's success from day one.
As the program grew, so did the table. Adam Fletcher, Chief Security Officer at Blackstone, joined as a founding employer partner and council member, bringing the perspective of one of the world's most sophisticated financial institutions. And when Citizens became an employer partner, Terrence Driscoll, their CISO, joined the council as well, deepening both the advisory bench and the hiring pipeline in a single step.
We started with the assumption that the CISO Council would be primarily curriculum advisory, a group that would help us shape what we taught. And it did that. Their guidance shaped our emphasis on practical, role-based learning. They pointed us toward certifications worth pursuing (CompTIA, OSCP, ISC2). Sangram suggested bug bounty programs as a measure of real-world instinct. Julie kept reminding us: look for the curious ones, the ones who go deep.
But over time, the Council evolved into something more consequential: an active job placement engine.
Rather than just advising on what Fellows should know, council members became champions for where Fellows could go. The shift was subtle at first, starting with a mention of an opening here, an introduction there. But it crystallized into something intentional. Members began thinking about what junior work existed in their organizations that could be carved out for Pursuit talent. They started advocating internally. The council wasn't just shaping the curriculum anymore; it was opening doors.
Akira Brown joined Red Canary (now Zscaler) as a Detection Engineer Associate. In the span of a year, he shipped multiple detectors, including two in a single day, and began mentoring a new associate engineer. When we brought him back to the CISO Council as a featured guest, watching him hold his own in a room full of senior security leaders, asking sharp questions about the future of AI in detection, that was the program working.
At Blackstone, we placed three Fellows: Adnan Abubakar Adams, now operating as a junior SME on Cloudflare automation initiatives; Lili Huang, who shipped an internal vulnerability detection tool now running across multiple departments; and Larry Lamouth, a Cloud Security Engineer who completed a major project now live in production. Larry's story carries a particular kind of weight. His stability at Blackstone helped him secure healthcare and schooling support for his daughter. That ripple effect is exactly what economic mobility looks like in practice.
At Citizens, Justin Overton and Christina Loiacono joined a cybersecurity rotational program, supported by the same employer relationship that brought Terrence Driscoll to the council table.
Together, these placements generated over $100,000 in additional employer funding for Pursuit, proof that when you develop talent well, employers will invest to access it.
The cybersecurity landscape doesn't stand still. Neither do we.
As AI began reshaping the field, accelerating threat detection, automating routine tasks, shifting what junior analysts need to know, we knew the curriculum had to move with it. What started as a cybersecurity track became an AI-enabled cyber curriculum, and then something more ambitious: an AI-native approach to how Fellows learn and work.
The pivot meant more than adding AI tools to the syllabus. It meant rethinking how Fellows approach problems, using AI as a force multiplier rather than a shortcut, and learning to verify, interrogate, and build on AI outputs rather than simply consume them. The CISO Council was a sounding board throughout this evolution, helping us separate what was genuinely durable in cyber from what was being disrupted.
Today, a two-week intensive cyber course grounded in AI-native principles is embedded in our Level 3 programming. It's not just a topic. It's a lens.
The next chapter is, in many ways, the most ambitious.
We're working toward a model that integrates cybersecurity not just as a standalone track, but as a thread woven through Pursuit's broader AI training work. That means building formal pathways from training into employment, co-designing curriculum alongside the CISO Council so that what Fellows learn maps directly to what organizations need, and expanding the circle of employers who see Pursuit talent as a reliable, long-term pipeline.
We've learned that training without a clear pathway leads to attrition. We've also learned that when Fellows can see the door they're walking toward, they run. The goal now is to build that door at scale, in partnership with the same people who helped us build the table in the first place.
None of this happened automatically. It happened because a group of senior security leaders chose to show up, to meetings, to conversations, to hard questions about whether our model was really working.
To everyone who has been part of the CISO Council: thank you for the candor, the connections, and the commitment. You didn't just advise a program. You helped build a pipeline that is changing the arc of people's lives.
We're just getting started.
Whether you're an employer looking to hire, a security leader who wants to help shape what's next, or an organization ready to invest in your team's AI and cyber readiness, there are real ways to engage.
Hire AI-cyber talent. Pursuit Fellows bring technical depth, resilience, and an AI-native mindset to early-career security roles. If your team has openings in detection, cloud security, GRC, or adjacent areas, let's talk.
Bring a workshop to your organization. We offer AI training programs with embedded cybersecurity components, designed for teams at any technical level. Whether you're a small business, a nonprofit, or a larger enterprise, we can build something that fits.
Join the CISO Council. If you're a security leader who wants to volunteer your expertise, help shape curriculum, and open doors for the next generation of talent, we'd love to have you at the table.
Reach out to Devika Gopal Agge at devika@pursuit.org to start a conversation. And to learn more about the Ballistic X Pursuit Cyber Fellows Program, visit pursuit.org/cyber.