Whenever venture capitalists write a check, they are actually silently calculating different exit scenarios in their minds. This is part of their responsibility as trustees. However, almost everyone publicly claims that every portfolio company they invest in will ultimately lead to IPO.
The co-founder of New York's two-year-old cybersecurity fund, Brightmind Partners, Stephen Ward, said bluntly that this is not the case. "You must sell on the way up," he said.
Ward This unadorned, pragmatic attitude is one of the reasons that sets him apart. Another reason is the size of his company's first fund at the end of last year: it amounted to a whopping 250 million US dollars, which he raised together with his co-founder Gur Talpaz. The third reason lies in his background: before he even started considering investing, he served in the Coast Guard, and later worked for 9 years in the Secret Service, where he held various positions including TIAA and Home Depot as CISO.
An example that demonstrates this combination is effective is SGNL. CrowdStrike agreed to acquire this identity security startup for $740 million in January, 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 the first one. However, this time, he will no longer partner with Talpaz; Talpaz left the company in April along with another early colleague, making Ward the sole general partner of the firm. At a time when early-stage cybersecurity startups are for the first time raising more funding than their later competitors, and this trend has continued for over a decade without interruption, he has chosen to bet on himself at this moment.
Ward's calm attitude towards quitting stems from an unusual professional experience. He grew up between two farms in northwestern New Jersey, where his family didn't even have enough money to support his brothers' college education. After graduating from high school, inspired by an advertisement about someone jumping from a helicopter, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he could barely swim at that time. He worked there for four years doing search and rescue tasks.
After that, he studied criminal justice at Seton Hall in New Jersey and half-heartedly considered attending law school. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Ward told me last week at Zoom, wearing a light-colored hoodie that made him look more like a basketball coach than a venture capitalist. “I’m a bit lost. I miss the military, the camaraderie among soldiers, and all those things.”
After graduating in 1998, he sent out approximately 300 resumes, but received no responses at all. A professor named Seton Hall who was also a member of the Secret Service and a pastor associated with 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, shifted his focus to cyber threats. That same year, he married a former college classmate who is of Syrian descent and a Muslim; she also became an agent for the Secret Service. His colleagues warned him that the background check process would be "very difficult." (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; instead, they "recruited" him as an informant and worked with him for about three years. But this hacker continued to commit crimes behind the back of Ward. When he was caught again, in order to divert attention, he claimed to 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 that investigation as “almost like a spouse having an affair,” because he held deep feelings for that organization. The hacker was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison, and Audible even purchased the rights to that story and adapted it into an 8-episode podcast called “Operation Firewall.”
By most standards, Ward's corporate career can be considered successful, yet he describes it as a series of leaps that he was not actually qualified to undertake. In 2007, he was hired by JPMorgan Chase to lead the network security department, which was one of the most challenging transitions in his professional life. He felt like "the dumbest person in the room" at that time and missed his team from the Secret Service so much that he even thought about returning twice, not knowing that he was still under investigation. He persevered, and now he 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 for another two years starting in 2019. However, by 2021, he felt completely exhausted and resigned for the first time without having a new job in mind – this was the first time he had done so since he was 16 years old.
That phase did not last too long. The security software used by Home Depot came from Wiz, and the founder of Wiz included him in the company's job candidate list. The venture capital firm Jeff Horing of Insight Partners co-led a $100 million Series A financing for Wiz at the end of 2020. They interviewed Ward first, and then offered him the position at Insight.
This experience had its good and bad points, as Wiz was acquired by Google for $32 billion last year. When I asked about it last week, Ward mentioned that the friend who replaced him at Wiz “made a fortune that changed his life,” but he said that wouldn’t bother him.
In any case, he only stayed at Insight for three years, during which time he stated that he participated in projects such as Wiz, Abnormal Security, and Elisity. In IonQ, in October, they agreed to acquire Elisity 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 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 and Talpaz jointly founded Brightmind in 2024. Talpaz is a senior executive in corporate development at CrowdStrike; his responsibilities overlap with those of Ward during the Insight period. Tayler Sipperly also comes from the corporate development department of CrowdStrike and is the third employee to join the company.
However, this partnership came to an end this spring. When asked about the reasons, Ward used cautious legal language to state that there were differences between the two parties regarding "operations and the future direction of Brightmind." In August, Talpaz and Sipperly co-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 reportedly targeting a $170 million initial fund to invest in cybersecurity startups.
As of now, the first fund of Brightmind has completed 14 investments, with only one exit: SGNL.
Some investors asked why Brightmind did not hold onto this investment for a longer period of time. However, Ward stated that, based on his professional experience, he had seen enough cases to be confident in advising the founder not to “miss the turning point.”
In the field of cybersecurity, he believes that the best deals usually occur between the third and seventh years after a startup is founded. In fact, he says his team tracks every security acquisition, as well as whether the buyer is developing their own solutions or making a purchase. If Palo Alto Networks might buy something, he says CrowdStrike would develop a sense of “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and then Zscaler would also look back and say, “What just did they do? I should probably do the same.”
Ward explained that the key lies in understanding how these pieces fit together. He gave some hypothetical examples: if CrowdStrike is developing its own product, it is unlikely to acquire a company that makes a similar product. Palo Alto Networks might like a certain company, but if acquiring it would force customers to switch from the product they bought five years ago, that might not be appropriate either.
"It's actually very easy to decide whether it's 'very suitable' or 'terrible'," he said. "And yet, that's exactly what we spend a lot of time trying to figure out."
At least in terms of timing, he had the advantage. Data from PitchBook shows that early-stage cybersecurity startups raised more funding than their later competitors for the first time in over a decade; as of September, the total amount raised from seed to Series B rounds reached $4.7 billion.
Although the number of transactions has decreased from 358 last year to 248 this year, the total amount has already exceeded that of the entire year of 2025. PitchBook also shows that seed rounds are particularly expanding. In the first nine months of this year, the average size of cybersecurity seed rounds soared from $5.54 million a year ago to $8.4 million.
Ward is skeptical about how much of the funds actually flow towards AI security. According to PitchBook's statistics, there were 278 transactions classified in this direction in the first half of 2026, but his team's manual review only identified 30 of them as genuine AI security projects. He believes that Anthropic or OpenAI will not "take over the security world," but will only do just enough.
In terms of real-time protection – which he refers to as “zero-second” protection – he prefers network security models that run locally within the customers’ own systems, such as the solution provided by Empirical Security. He is also looking for startups that have the capability to outperform 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 indicates that the second fund of Brightmind will not invest solely in cybersecurity; approximately 20% of the funds will be directed towards AI infrastructure projects. 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, the answer came almost immediately: those who are starting a business for the second time and whose team has always stayed together.
Brightmind currently has 5 members: The Chief Operating Officer, Iva Messy, who is also a graduate of Seton Hall. She was recommended by Carl Eschenbach (who is now back at Sequoia) and joined the company from Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Sven Wollschlaeger is from the Midwestern United States, and Ward calls him one of the most diligent people he knows. He worked with Insight and Ward for three years and is now a partner at Brightmind.
CTO Jamie Mneimneh is the most technically skilled person in the team. Ward initially hired him as a distinguished engineer at Home Depot; he set up the company's AWS cloud computing environment for testing products of startups. Mneimneh also built the AI proxy that currently supports the majority of Brightmind's transaction sources. This is also how the company manages to avoid hiring a large number of analysts and keep its management fees low, Ward says.
Taylor Cleveland used to be the chief of staff for Ward at Home Depot, and also joined this company a few months ago.
Despite several career changes, Ward says that the driving force behind him has always remained the same. He came from a poor family when he was young and is still concerned that this situation could happen again. He states that he is paid to achieve a "3x net fund return," and until that goal is met, he "will not celebrate."
Ward said, "I don't know what exactly is wrong with me. I have this naive attitude where I always feel that I'm not qualified enough to do something. I keep looking at others and thinking 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 then I will know even more than you.' That's just how competitive I am."
