My Story

Career

I came up in cybersecurity before it was the boardroom priority it is today. I started at Cigna, moving from analyst to advisor across multiple technical disciplines. From there, the mandates grew: cloud security at Aetna, federal cloud enablement at Booz Allen Hamilton, a $431M State Department modernization at Deloitte, and enterprise security program leadership at LinkedIn.

In every one of those roles, the standard was unambiguous. You secured the environment or you didn't. You earned the Authorization to Operate or you went back and fixed what was broken. That shaped how I think about leadership. Not as a title, but as a commitment to the outcome.

I also learned what it looks like when talented people are let down by broken systems. Organizations investing heavily in compliance and still getting it wrong. Not from bad intentions, but because the infrastructure was fragile, manual, and built for a different era. That pattern, repeated across every sector I worked in, is what eventually became ProfytAI.

And I learned to operate at the executive level in the truest sense: translating complex risk into language boards can act on, building coalitions across competing priorities, and making hard calls without perfect information. Those aren't skills you get from certifications. They come from showing up, repeatedly, in environments where the cost of getting it wrong is real.

What I accumulated over those thirteen years wasn't just experience. It was a view of the compliance problem from the inside, across every level of scale, that very few people have. I've seen it as an analyst, an advisor, a manager, and a senior leader. I know where the failures originate, what the workarounds cost, and what a real fix would actually require. That's the foundation ProfytAI is built on.

What I believe

Security and compliance are not the same thing. Most organizations treat them as if they are. Compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. Meeting a framework requirement means you've documented that you tried. It does not mean you're secure.

The organizations that get security right don't treat it as a constraint on the business. They treat it as a competitive advantage: something that earns trust from customers, partners, and regulators before anyone thinks to ask for it. That posture is a choice, and it starts at the top.

I believe that how you build a team is a security decision. Diverse teams ask different questions, model threats differently, and perform better when it matters most. That's not a values statement. It's an operational reality I've watched play out across every environment I've worked in.

I also believe that how a leader shows up in the hard moments tells you everything about who they actually are. The most important thing you can do for the people on your team is make them feel like they genuinely belong there. Not as a cultural initiative, but as a daily practice. That's the kind of leader I'm still working to be.

Why I started ProfytAI

By the time I left LinkedIn, I had seen the compliance problem at every level of scale, from startup through enterprise, commercial through federal. The pattern was always the same: too many manual processes, too little real-time visibility, too much energy spent scrambling to prepare for audits rather than being genuinely ready for them.

ProfytAI is built on one premise: compliance should be continuous, not episodic. Organizations should know their security posture at any moment, not six weeks before an audit when the scramble begins. AI makes that possible in a way that simply wasn't viable a few years ago.

We're based in Ho Chi Minh City. That's not incidental. It's where ProfytAI is registered and where we closed our initial funding. Southeast Asia is the market we're building into first: regulated industries growing faster than the compliance infrastructure supporting them, governments tightening frameworks across fintech, healthcare, and critical infrastructure at pace. The opportunity is significant, and it's a fraction of where this goes. We didn't land here by accident. We came here because this is where the window is open and the problem is most acute.

Right now

Building ProfytAI's first enterprise partnerships across Southeast Asia and shaping what continuous compliance infrastructure looks like for fintech and healthcare companies operating in high-growth, high-regulation markets.

Writing about leadership, building companies, and the harder personal work that sits underneath both.

Available for advisory engagements and speaking on cybersecurity, AI-driven compliance, and executive leadership in regulated industries.