Paul Shinn. Photo credit: Jason Doiy/ALM

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Inc. on Monday announced the appointment of Paul Shinn as chief legal officer as the privately held company tries to decide whether to go public.

Shinn brings more than 20 years of Silicon Valley experience as a corporate counsel advising high-growth technology companies. Most recently he served as chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development for Gigamon Inc., a networking software company, for over six years. He led that company's successful IPO in 2013.

Prior to that, he served as associate general counsel at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise for five years. He also worked 10 years and was senior counsel at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California. CrowdStrike is based in Sunnyvale, California.

“We are thrilled to welcome Paul to CrowdStrike at this pivotal time in the company's growth trajectory,” said a statement from George Kurtz, CrowdStrike's co-founder and chief executive officer. “His background spans a broad spectrum of legal and business areas, including extensive experience with global companies going through explosive growth.”

Shinn told Corporate Counsel that his priorities include helping “the organization continue to rapidly expand globally and serve our customer base with the most innovative technology available to stay one step ahead of sophisticated cyber adversaries.”

He added, “I'm joining CrowdStrike at a very exciting time—the company has experienced massive global growth.” The company said it has doubled its revenues and head count, and has won contracts with over 16 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies and 20 percent of companies in the Fortune 500.

The company provides computer security, threat intelligence and incident response services to customers in more than 170 countries. It has been involved in several high-profile cases, including the Sony Pictures hack, and the 2016 Democratic National Committee cyberattacks. And it has found and outed Chinese, Russian and North Korean corporate hackers.

Shinn attributed much of CrowdStrike's growth to its use of a cloud-based platform called Falcon, which delivers intelligence and protection. The company claims that its software “instantly correlates over 150 billion security events a day” to detect and prevent attacks.

Shinn said, “As major breaches continue to plague headlines, cybersecurity must be elevated to a corporate board responsibility. The hope is that we at CrowdStrike can be instrumental in up-leveling cybersecurity as a board priority for organizations all over the world.”

At Gigamon, Shinn was honored by Corporate Counsel affiliate The Recorder as “an impact GC” for his work on the IPO.

At the time, he told The Recorder he put a lot of work into getting everyone inside Gigamon up to speed on what it means to be a public company.

“I worked on the corporate governance and policy and realized it would only work if it was threaded and weaved into the strong ethics at Gigamon,” Shinn said. “But since a lot of people didn't have experience with the technical rules around being public, we also had to make sure all our rules were easy to follow.”

Now Shinn may find himself walking that IPO path again.