The RSA Conference CEO Panel on "The Entrepreneur Journey to Scale" put Stuart McClure on stage alongside other founders and chief executives who had navigated the path from initial product vision to enterprise-grade business. As the founder of Cylance — the cybersecurity company that grew to a $1.5 billion acquisition at record speed — Stuart brought one of the most compelling scaling stories in the industry's history to the conversation.
The panel explored the distinctively difficult challenges of scaling a security startup: building trust with enterprise buyers who cannot afford to be wrong, competing against entrenched legacy vendors with massive installed bases and marketing budgets, and maintaining technical integrity as commercial pressures escalate. Stuart's experience at Cylance included navigating all of these challenges in an unusually compressed timeframe, which gave him specific and hard-won insight into each dimension of the scaling problem.
Key themes from the discussion included the role of storytelling in early enterprise sales — how Cylance had to help buyers understand what AI-native security meant before they could evaluate whether Cylance was delivering it — the importance of hiring for cultural fit at growth stages when organizational identity is still forming, and the specific decisions that proved most consequential in the years between founding and the BlackBerry acquisition.
Stuart's track record as a serial entrepreneur — five successful companies including Foundstone, acquired by McAfee — gave him broad context beyond the Cylance story, making his contributions to the panel particularly rich in pattern recognition about what founder behaviors and organizational choices differentiate companies that scale successfully from those that plateau or fail.