A Founder's Manifesto

Herd Security exists for one reason: to make cybersecurity knowledge accessible to everyone -not just the people who already speak the language.

Security hygiene should work like physical fitness. People know it matters. They know it requires consistency. And they understand, on some level, that it has to become part of how they live and work -not something they think about once a year during a compliance training. That vision is what Herd was built to realize.

I never wanted to be an engineer. That path was something my parents -like so many Asian-American parents -believed was the safe and practical choice. The kind of thing that gets you a job. The problem was, I wasn't particularly good at the things engineering required. Tests, technical precision, structured problem-solving -none of it came naturally to me.

What came naturally was people. Public speaking. Debate. Thinking quickly on my feet. Convincing someone of a point of view -not by being louder, but by making it make sense to them. I didn't realize it at the time, but that skill -translating complexity into clarity -would become the foundation of everything I'd later build.

In 2017, I joined Duo Security. It remains the best career move I've ever made, and the best company I've ever been a part of. My role was helping organizations implement multi-factor authentication -teaching them how to use it, why it mattered, and how to make it stick.

One evening, I had dinner with a friend who worked at a firm I'd recently helped onboard. Mid-meal, his phone buzzed with a Duo push notification. Without hesitating, without glancing at the screen, he accepted it and kept talking.

"Do you have any idea what you just did?"

He had no idea. And the realization that hit me in that moment wasn't frustration -it was clarity. It doesn't matter how good a security product is if the people using it don't understand what they're protecting or why. The technology had done its job. The human piece had been left behind.

Ten minutes of conversation later, my friend understood MFA. He understood his role in keeping his organization safe. He understood that his behavior -a single tap on a phone -could either protect or expose an entire company. That conversation planted a seed that never stopped growing.

In 2021, I tried to act on that seed by founding You Cybersecurity (YouCS) -a mobile application designed to help social media influencers protect their personal brand, accounts, and digital assets. The market need was real. The timing was reasonable. But the execution was part-time, and that limitation defined the outcome.

YouCS didn't work. But failure has a way of teaching what success can't. What I learned was that the problem I cared about was genuine, urgent, and largely unsolved. The framing just needed to shift. I wasn't building for influencers. I was building for the people inside organizations who were expected to care about security but had never been given a reason -or a way -to actually connect with it.

By 2025, the problem had evolved from urgent to critical. The rise of AI didn't just change how attacks are built -it changed what attacks look like to the people receiving them. Deepfakes. AI-generated phishing. Social engineering that sounds like a colleague, a manager, a friend. The most dangerous vulnerabilities are no longer technical gaps. They're human ones.

The traditional responses -Security Awareness Training, Human Risk Management platforms -weren't broken. But they were incomplete. They told people what not to do, without giving security professionals the tools to make people want to do better.

Herd was not built to replace existing security training. It was built to unlock the people who deliver it.

Security professionals are not lacking ideas. They are not lacking expertise, creativity, or genuine care about the people they're trying to protect. What they lack is time -and a platform that makes it easy to turn what's in their heads into something the rest of their organization can actually absorb.

Herd changes that. Using AI as a creative partner, any security professional can transform their knowledge into polished training content, internal communications, awareness campaigns, and multimedia assets -in hours, not weeks. Text, video, image. Dozens of pieces of content from a single session. The bottleneck of production disappears. What remains is the expertise, the judgment, and the human voice behind it all.

Humans don't have a security problem. They've been blamed for one long enough.

The failure to connect people to cybersecurity has never been a people problem. It has been a communication problem. People respond when information reaches them in ways that feel relevant, human, and clear. The opportunity has always been there. What was missing was the bridge.

Security professionals have always been that bridge -they just haven't always had the tools to build it quickly enough. Herd gives them those tools. It amplifies what they already know, and makes it possible to reach everyone who needs to hear it.