Jon Murchison

Cisco Books From an Older Brother

He did not set out to work in computers. He told the Modern CTO podcast: the reality is I was an athlete at University of Maryland. He is the youngest of four, and an older brother working in Silicon Valley, who later became a vice president at CrowdStrike, gave him some books in the late 1990s. he handed me a few Cisco books and said, "Hey, knucklehead, you know, start reading this stuff. It'll be good for you."

He read them and taught himself networking, then Windows domains and general IT work. He still argues that this is the right starting point for a security career: I think IT is some of the best fundamentals you can have because it allows you to understand networking and subnetting and how to move around. His first jobs were as a network engineer working on large carrier networks.

Twelve Years on the Offensive Side

From network engineering he moved to the National Security Agency. In a 2023 interview with SMB Nation he described the work: I spent 12 years there, kind of computer network operations kind of on the offensive side. And my kind of specialty was kind of nuclear weapons. He told CIO Influence in 2025 that At the NSA, I operated like an adversary, finding and exploiting weaknesses in networks.

He says that time shaped how Blackpoint finds attackers. Much of what intruders do once inside a network looks like ordinary administration, so he values staff who come from IT as well as from security. Blackpoint builds live maps of each customer's network for that reason. I always felt like, man, the SOC guys, and I've been on both sides of this, they're always focused on kind of malware, command and control, bad DNS, he told Modern CTO.

Two Companies Called Blackpoint

He left the NSA, and in 2007 the agency asked him to return. He told Modern CTO that he turned it down several times and then made a counteroffer: I decided to ask them, you know, would you hire me if I started my own business? The first Blackpoint did government work and began writing its own software around 2011. He sold that business in 2014.

The name came from a phone call with his brother. He wanted a nod to black operations, and at the time he hunted birds with his Vizsla, a pointing dog. So I just smashed the two together. So it really means nothing. But that's how we got Blackpoint.

The commercial company began with an injury. In 2014 he went skiing down a dirt bike trail in Maryland with his boots barely buckled. I went to stop and my ski stuck, and I blew up both my knees. The injury kept him from working, and he turned the software into a product of its own: And so I ended up kind of spinning out what is Blackpoint's offering today. The company now dates its founding to 2014.

Blackpoint chose to sell through managed service providers, the IT firms that run technology for small businesses, and to have its own analysts act on threats rather than pass alerts back. It was early to respond to attacks inside Microsoft 365. He told SMB Nation in 2023 that we're the first company in the world doing live response, Microsoft 365, we do over 40 a week right now.

He kept spending tight while other startups raised large rounds. In June 2023 Blackpoint took a $190 million growth investment led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, with Accel, according to Bain Capital. Before that, he said, we had only raised 26, and didn't even spend anywhere close to all of it.

Handing Over the CEO Job

He has said the hard part of the job was never the technology. The actual task of catching hackers isn't the toughest part; it's building a world-class organization. In June 2025 Blackpoint made Gagan Singh, a former chief operating officer of McAfee, its chief executive, and Murchison took the new role of executive chairman, as CRN reported. This transition allows me to double down on those areas while continuing to shape our high-level strategy, he said, referring to product design, strategy, response operations and work with partners.

Views on SIEM and Zero Trust

He is openly skeptical of the log analysis systems most large companies buy. In a Q&A published by Blackpoint he said: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a failed technology for catching hackers. He believes they are useful for compliance but slow to stop an intrusion.

He is also wary of locking down every computer so that only approved software can run. I don't believe in zero trust application control for every environment. In busy networks, he said, every printer driver or Windows update becomes a problem, and security that blocks normal work undermines the value it is meant to add.

Letting Off Steam

He races cars. So I race a form of Miata. The series, Chump Spec Miata, uses caged early Miatas with the same horsepower, suspension and tires, with 35 to 50 cars on a road course at each event. His children are ski racers, which is why the family spends much of the year in Colorado. My main home's in Maryland, and I'm out in Colorado for half the year because my kids are ski racers.