Partner and Advisor
Kleiner PerkinsCheck size: Neither Kleiner Perkins nor Ted publishes a personal check range on the cited pages. His Kleiner record spans early-stage and growth companies, but portfolio round sizes and Ballistic's fund sizes do not establish his individual Kleiner check authority.
Ted is an operator-investor focused on cybersecurity and technology infrastructure across company formation, early-stage investment, scaling, and public-sector adoption. His Kleiner portfolio spans application and cloud security, identity, threat detection, incident response, security operations, enterprise data, supply-chain intelligence, and defense software. His approach combines product depth, customer and government networks, executive recruiting, and long-term board work to help technically strong teams become category leaders.
Founders with firsthand security or infrastructure expertise, differentiated technology, an urgent and expanding attack surface, products that clarify complex risk, teams able to win demanding enterprise or government customers, high-end execution, strong sales leadership, and architectures that turn security from reactive tools into continuous and measurable resilience.
No formal pass list is published. His record implies caution toward undifferentiated point tools, security claims without technical proof, products lacking a clear buyer and deployment path, teams without deep domain credibility, and companies unable to recruit enterprise-grade leadership or navigate long security and government sales cycles. These are inferred filters.
Lead with the threat model, buyer pain, and why existing controls fail. Demonstrate technical differentiation, deployment path, measurable risk reduction, integration with the security stack, false-positive burden, data advantage, and enterprise or government go-to-market. Be ready to discuss the executive team, CISO references, regulatory or procurement constraints, and how the product becomes a durable platform rather than another alerting point solution.
Define the expanding technical or organizational surface, the adversary and failure mode, the cost of exposure, and why existing controls cannot keep pace.
Measure whether the product converts noisy telemetry into prioritized, explainable remediation or response without overwhelming already constrained security teams.
Look beyond direct vendors to discover and continuously score hidden dependencies whose compromise can interrupt operations, expose data, or damage reputation.
Pair differentiated security technology with the leadership, board, CISO access, design partners, sales motion, integrations, and proof required to become the trusted high-end platform.
Application security can move earlier in development by connecting code, architecture, developers, and business context to identify and remediate material risk before release.
A technically superior threat-management platform can win a crowded security market through focus on high-value customers, a formidable sales organization, and disciplined executive and board building.
Machine learning can map multi-tier supplier networks and continuously expose otherwise opaque operational and reputational risks across globally interconnected supply chains.
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Ted has spent roughly three decades at Kleiner Perkins and more than four decades in cybersecurity. He led Symantec's antivirus effort and helped launch a commercial antivirus product, later served as founding CEO of Fortify Software, and has guided more than 30 founders to exits. His public service includes advisory or trustee work with the NSA, In-Q-Tel, and CISA; he is a former NVCA chair and a University of Pennsylvania trustee with a bachelor's degree in Economics.