Mikhail Petrov

Mikhail Petrov entered cybersecurity as a white-hat hacker in Russia before immigrating to the United States and building a career protecting enterprise networks. After earning his master's degree in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon, Mikhail spent years as a security architect at Cisco and Palo Alto Networks before transitioning to analyzing cybersecurity companies as an investor. His technical background—he holds multiple security certifications including CISSP and CEH—gives him credibility when evaluating vendor claims and product capabilities. Mikhail understands the threat landscape from both attacker and defender perspectives, having responded to numerous breaches and built security operations centers. He excels at identifying which cybersecurity categories have sustainable demand versus overhyped solutions chasing limited budgets. Mikhail was early to recognize zero trust architecture's importance and correctly predicted consolidation among endpoint security vendors. His analysis covers everything from firewall and intrusion prevention systems to emerging categories like SIEM, SOAR, and extended detection and response. Based in San Francisco, Mikhail maintains connections across the cybersecurity community while helping investors separate signal from noise in this rapidly evolving, fragmented market.