A little more than six months after Swedish-based Truesec opened its North American HQ to San Marco, the company is thriving on the First Coast.
The Business Journal caught up with CEO Tomas Sjöström at the 10th annual Tech Coast Conference to see how the cyber defense company is settling in. While at the conference, Truesec demonstrated a red team and blue team cyber penetration attack where one group of analysts defended a virtual network while conference attendees attempted to breach their security. Exhibitions like these, and being involved with organization like the IT Council, Sjöström said, is one of the many ways Truesec is involving itself with the First Coast's tech scene.
Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview:
It's been about six months; how are you settling in?
Our office in San Marco is fully up and running now and we've been establishing ourselves out in the community. It's honestly been really bracing and the response has been overwhelming.
How has the reception been?
It's been great. Jacksonville is such an amazing place and in an amazing moment. There are so many interesting companies here doing transformational things, it's really good to be a part of it.
Last time you spoke to the Business Journal you were in the midst of a hiring spree. How did that work out and what type of response did you receive?
We hired a bunch of people in April and are actually hiring again. We're now looking more for senior-level experts, cloud security engineers and people like that.
But hiring has gone really well. I think we talked about this last time... but there are like 20 universities within six hours of Jacksonville. So the quality of people that we've been able to get has been incredible.
Other local companies have said it has been a problem finding local talent, but it sounds like you've been lucky.
Yeah, we're getting so many quality CVs that for those that we can't hire, I'm literally taking them and giving them to colleagues in other parts of the company telling them to hire them ASAP.
Looking into 2024, what's next for Truesec?
We have really ambitious growth plans. We have a couple of interesting ideas on how to make what we do more known in Florida and the Southeast. So we'll be working on that project. But really, we're going to keep doing what we've been doing: growing organically.
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