Kavia Venkatesh

I started my career after college with an internship at Molson Coors, a beer company, where I was introduced to cyber during their major acquisition with MillerCoors. I gained extensive experience with integration of technology areas and due diligence on corporate development tasks associated with mergers and acquisitions. I built deep connections with the security teams there, and one of those leaders transitioned to Kaiser and offered me a role to help build the cyber portfolio. I worked with SMEs in different areas, managed investment budgets for cyber across multiple domains, identified innovative vendors, and implemented solutions within the cyber world - that was essentially my crash course in cyber. My niche background in both M&A and cyber led to an opportunity at Twilio, where I partnered closely with the M&A team and cyber team to build out security M&A processes. That led me to my next role in vulnerability management at Google, where I used to do the releases for Android OS - I would single-handedly manage the monthly security updates for every Android device around the world, which was extremely overwhelming and rewarding. Now I'm in product security in the healthcare space, where I focus on protecting our environment from zero-day supply chain risks and attacks, developing strategy to evolve the product security program, and building and elevating my team. I spend a lot of time communicating risk from product security areas that people underestimate or don't understand, breaking it down to make it understandable. Every day is exciting and different - I'm not someone who likes monotony, so I put myself in situations where I probably don't have a solution immediately, but work through it and build frameworks and methodologies over time. That has been very rewarding and energizing for me.