"Every time a venture capitalist writes a check, they are actually silently calculating different exit scenarios in their minds." This is part of their responsibility as trustees. However, almost everyone openly states that every company in their portfolio will ultimately lead to IPO.
Brightmind Partners and co-founder Stephen Ward bluntly stated that this is not the case. The co-founders of this two-year-old cybersecurity fund based in New York said, "You must sell on the way up."
Ward This unadorned and pragmatic attitude is one of the reasons that sets him apart. Another reason is the scale of his first fund, which reached a whopping $250 million at the end of last year, and which he raised together with his co-founder Gur Talpaz. The third reason lies in his background: before truly considering investment, he served in the Coast Guard, worked for 9 years in the Secret Service, and has held various positions at TIAA and Home Depot, including the role of CISO.
An example that demonstrates this combination is effective is SGNL. CrowdStrike agreed to acquire this identity security startup for $740 million in January of this year, while Brightmind led its Series A financing 11 months prior to that.
Today, Ward is raising a second fund, with a target size roughly the same as that of the first. However, this time, he will no longer partner with Talpaz; the latter left in April along with another early colleague, making Ward the sole general partner of the company. At a time when early-stage cybersecurity startups are for the first time raising more funding than their later competitors, a phenomenon that has persisted for over a decade, he has chosen to bet on himself at this moment.
His calm attitude towards quitting stems from an unusual professional experience. Ward says that he grew up between two farms in northwestern New Jersey, and his family didn't even have enough money to send his brothers to college. After graduating from high school, he was inspired by an advertisement featuring a person jumping from a helicopter to join the Coast Guard; however, he also admits that he could barely swim at that time. He worked in search and rescue for four years.
After that, he studied criminal justice at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and briefly considered attending law school as well. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do at the time,” Ward told me last week through Zoom. Wearing a light-colored hoodie, he looked more like a basketball coach than a venture capitalist. “I was a bit lost. I missed the military, that camaraderie, and all of that.”
After graduating in 1998, he submitted around 300 resumes but received no responses at all. A professor who is also a Secret Service agent and a member of FBI and CIA, began to help him make connections, and it was the Secret Service that got in touch with him first.
The Secret Service has two main tasks: protecting personnel and investigating financial crimes. Ward initially focused on investigative work, but after the September 11 attacks in 2001, he shifted his focus to "cybersecurity." That same year, he married a college classmate who is a Syrian-American Muslim. His colleagues warned him that the background checks would be "very painful." (They are still happily married to this day.)
What happened next led Ward down an unexpected path in life. While stationed in New York, he arrested a hacker who had committed the largest credit card data theft at that time. However, Ward did not prosecute him but instead "recruited" him as an informant, having him work for them for about three years. But this hacker continued to commit crimes without Ward's knowledge. When he was caught again, in order to divert attention, he claimed that Ward was also involved.
At that time, Ward had already left the Secret Service to enter the private sector and it took him about 18 months to clear his name. “It was very difficult to get up during that period,” he said, describing the investigation as “almost like a spouse having an affair,” because he loved that institution so much. The hacker was eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison, while Audible purchased the rights to this story and adapted it into an 8-episode podcast called “Operation Firewall.”
By most standards, the corporate career of Ward can be considered successful, yet he describes his experiences as a series of leaps that he was not actually qualified for. He joined JPMorgan Chase in 2007, where he was responsible for establishing the network security department, which was one of the most challenging transitions in his career. At that time, he felt like "the stupidest person in the room," missed his colleagues from the Secret Service, and even thought about returning twice, not realizing that he was still under investigation. He persevered, and now refers to this investment bank as "the best management school."
Subsequently, he held the position of CISO at the financial services company TIAA for 6 years, and then worked at Home Depot from 2019 for another two years. However, by 2021, he felt completely exhausted, and when he resigned, it was the first time since he was 16 that he didn't have a job lined up for the future.
However, this period of uncertainty did not last long. The founder of Wiz, Ward, who had previously used their security software at Home Depot, included him in the list of candidates for a position within the company. The venture capital firm Jeff Horing invested in Insight Partners and participated in the interviews; Insight co-led a $100 million Series A financing round for Wiz at the end of 2020, and subsequently offered Ward a position at Insight.
This is a story that contains both good and bad news, as Wiz was acquired by Google for $32 billion last year. When I asked about it last week, Ward said that the friend who took over Wiz's job "made a fortune that changed his life," but he himself stated that he didn't mind it.
In any case, he only stayed at Insight for three years. He said that during that time he participated in projects such as Wiz, Abnormal Security, and Elisity; the latter was acquired by IonQ in October for up to $1.3 billion. Subsequently, at the age of 49, he seriously considered starting his own business for the first time.
He said that many people told him that this was a game for young people. But he still left and began to send cold emails to people in limited partnerships. In the end, there were less than 20 entities that filled this fund’s LP, including Horing.
Ward co-founded Brightmind with Talpaz in 2024. Talpaz is a senior executive in corporate development at CrowdStrike; his experience in mergers and acquisitions overlaps with Ward's projects during his time at Insight. Another employee, CrowdStrike, who has a background in corporate development, is the company's third employee.
However, this partnership came to an end this spring. When asked what happened, Ward used cautious legal language to state that the reason was "differences in opinion regarding the operations and future direction of Brightmind." In August, Talpaz and Sipperly jointly founded a new venture capital firm with Elia Zaitsev, who had served as the global CTO of CrowdStrike for the past three years. The firm is named Cognition and is said to be seeking to raise a $170 million initial fund to invest in cybersecurity startups.
Sipperly indicates that he and Talpaz 'continue to support the existing portfolio companies of Brightmind as well as their limited partners', and 'still serve as board members of several portfolio companies under Brightmind'.
The first fund of Brightmind has so far completed 14 investments, with only one exit case: the sale of SGNL.
Some investors asked why Brightmind didn't hold on to that bet for a longer period of time. However, Ward said that he had seen enough in his career, so he was confident enough to remind the founders that they were "passing that turning point."
In the field of cybersecurity, he believes that the best deals usually occur between the 3rd and 7th years after a startup is founded. In fact, he says his team tracks every security acquisition, as well as whether the buyer is developing its own solutions or making an acquisition. If Palo Alto Networks might consider buying something, he says CrowdStrike would develop a “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and then Zscaler would look at all this and say, “What just did they do? I should probably do the same.”
Ward explained that the key is to figure out how these pieces fit together, and he cited some hypothetical scenarios. If CrowdStrike is developing its own product, then it's unlikely they would acquire a portfolio company that makes similar products. Palo Alto Networks might really like a certain company, but if acquiring it would force customers to switch from products they bought five years ago to something else, that might not be appropriate either.
“It’s easy to say, ‘very suitable’ or ‘terrible’,” he said. “But that’s exactly what we spend a lot of time trying to figure out.”
At least in terms of timing, he has the advantage. According to the data from PitchBook, early-stage cybersecurity startups have surpassed their later competitors in terms of financing amounts for over a decade now. As of September, the total amount of transactions from seed rounds to Series B rounds reached $4.7 billion.
Although the number of transactions has decreased from 358 last year to 248 this year, this total amount has already exceeded that of the entire year of 2025. PitchBook also shows that seed rounds are particularly expanding. In the first 9 months of this year, the average size of cybersecurity seed rounds rose to 8.4 million US dollars, compared to 5.54 million US dollars a year ago.
Ward raises doubts about how much of the funds actually flow towards AI's security measures. According to PitchBook's statistics, there were 278 transactions classified in this direction in the first half of 2026, but their team's manual review found that only 30 could truly be considered such. He believes that Anthropic or OpenAI will not "take over the security world," but will only manage to do "just enough."
For real-time protection – which he refers to as “zero-second” protection – he prefers network security models that run locally on customers’ own systems, such as the solution provided by Empirical Security. He is also looking for startups that have the capability to defeat what he considers to be vulnerable established companies, and specifically mentioned Qualys with a history of 27 years and Tenable with a history of 24 years.
Ward said that the second fund of Brightmind will not invest solely in cybersecurity; approximately 20% of the funds will be allocated to AI infrastructure transactions. He also expects that a considerable number of teams will come from Israel. (About 40% of the startups in the first fund are located in Tel Aviv.)
When asked what kind of founders he would be most willing to support, his answer was very straightforward: those who are starting a business for the second time and always stay united.
Brightmind currently has 5 employees: COO Iva Messy is also an alumnus of Seton Hall. She joined the company from Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz ( a16z ) upon the recommendation of Carl Eschenbach, who is a cousin of Ward and former Workday CEO, and has now returned to Sequoia. Sven Wollschlaeger is from the Midwestern United States, and Ward says he is one of the most diligent people she knows. He worked with Ward at Insight for three years and is currently the principal of Brightmind.
CTO Jamie Mneimneh is the most technically skilled person in the team. Ward initially hired him at Home Depot to take on the role of distinguished; he set up the company's AWS cloud computing environment for testing products of startups. Mneimneh also established the AI, which now provides the majority of project sources for Brightmind. This is also a way for the company to avoid hiring a whole team of analysts and keep management costs low, Ward says.
Taylor Cleveland used to be the chief of staff for Ward at Home Depot, and joined the company a few months ago.
Despite several changes in his career path, Ward says that the driving force behind him has always remained the same. He grew up in an environment without much money and still worries that such a situation could happen again. He claims to earn a salary that provides "three times the net fund return," and he "won't celebrate" until he achieves that goal.
Ward said, "I don't know exactly what I'm doing wrong. I have a very naive attitude towards the fact that I might not be qualified enough to do something. I always look at others and think to myself: 'Okay, today you know more than me, but tomorrow you'll know a little less, and the day after that even less. In the end, I will catch up with you, surpass you, and I will know even more than you.' That's just how competitive I am."
Update: Comments for Sipperly will be added after they are published.
