Blackpoint Founder Jon Murchison Talks CEO Transition, Acquisition Strategy And Getting ‘Back To My Basics’

As seen originally on CRN here.

‘On the business side, it allows me to focus my time and effort where I think my skills contribute the most to Blackpoint. … I’m just getting kind of back to my basics and where I came from when I started this company,’ Blackpoint founder and now Executive Chairman Jon Murchison tells CRN

June 23, 2025, 5:27 PM EDT: Executing on a plan that was eight months in the making, Blackpoint Cyber announced that founder and CEO Jon Murchison would move into a board role and hand the reins to a new CEO, Gagan Singh, a former McAfee and Norton executive with Harvard and MIT credentials.

“I needed to bring someone in that had a deep tech foundation and appreciation for product and technology. And Gagan started as a software engineer, so he had a technical base coming in,” Murchison told CRN shortly after the news was announced. “This is not like we brought in a finance guy to preface, to sell or something like that. It was nothing like that. It was all about really building on our good fundamentals and just scaling.”

Blackpoint Cyber is geared for international growth and is feeling out acquisitions to make its products better for MSP customers. Murchison said his passion lies in product design, offensive testing and speaking directly to customers. He said finding an operator like Singh who can scale the company leaves him free to pursue ways to make the product better and more relevant to MSPs.

“I think what made us special was we had, from the top down, a ton of focus on product,” Murchison told CRN. “And as you grow, it can pull you away from that a little bit. And I still think this is such a ground game. So for me, what I really look at is we just have an amazing leader who’s got a lot of skills maybe I don’t have.”

Blackpoint Cyber recently debuted its newest product, CompassOne, and has more in the pipeline. Murchison said the platform builds on the company’s MSP-focused managed detection and response (MDR) offering, with new features for security posture rating and cloud posture along with revamped capabilities for existing tools.

Murchison said he wants to spend time talking with MSPs about ways to make that product even better and spend time with his Security Operations Center (SOC) to test Blackpoint’s advances against threats.

“On the business side, it allows me to focus my time and effort where I think my skills contribute the most to Blackpoint, which to me is product, SOC, and also being the leading face in person for this company, and that’s not changing right now,” he told CRN. “I’m just getting kind of back to my basics and where I came from when I started this company.”

Big news today. I’d love to get some thoughts on what was it that went into this? Why did you decide that now is the time to take a board role and find somebody else to be CEO?

Honestly, this has been eight, nine months in the making. I think last fall, what we saw is we knew we were going to be coming out with this whole CompassOne platform, which is just an absolute, monumental amount of development that is going into this to really kind of consolidate MSP tools and keep it at the level of quality we’ve always been known for.

And when you take a step back, I look at myself and] I’m traveling 40 weeks a year. My passion is being out in front of MSPs. My passion is doing product design and being heavily involved with what we’re going to build next and the ‘how’ of it. And then also, I was an offensive cyber guy for the government for 12 years, and so my interest is in staying very close to our security operations. When I look at all that and look at how far we want to go as a company, it was like we’d be crazy not to bring in more help.

So you have this choice: bring in a president, or you can open the aperture a lot wider to really high-quality, successful folks that are moving into the CEO realm. And we thought, ‘You know what? I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay executive chairman. I’m going to be on the road. My presence is not going to diminish. It’s probably going to increase out there, right? But why not bring in, frankly, an elite operator? Probably someone that could be better than you when you’re traveling so much.

So for me, it was all about just strength. And 2025 has been a really good year for us—and we thought it was going to be with some of the changes we are making—so it was just, ‘Let’s force multiply.’

Why go outside the company to find somebody? And how is it that you chose Singh?

It’s a really good question. A lot of us in the company—we’ve grinded it out. We’ve built things. We worked through it, and we brought some outsiders in too of course. Obviously, we’ve been growing fast, but you can’t replace experience when it comes to scaling. I really believe that. I really believe you have to have someone that has been there and done that and seen what smart scale looks like.

With our investment concepts in growing internationally, Gagan has worked in six different countries. Tons of experience. Experience in cybersecurity as well. Another really big thing for me.

Back to your question, why Gagan [was chosen]. If I break it down [and] look at my company at the core, we’re an engineering company, we’re a software company, and we deliver our software to our customers via our Blackpoint Response Op Center, which [is] what we do for a living.

I needed to bring someone in that had a deep tech foundation and appreciation for product and technology. And Gagan started as a software engineer, so he had a technical base coming in. This is not like we brought in a finance guy as a preface to sell or something like that. It was nothing like that. It was all about really building on our good fundamentals and just scaling.

So how do you see yourself splitting up your time going forward here with Blackpoint?

One thing that has to be very clear: Gagan is the CEO.

I made that very clear to the company today when we announced it, but really my time is going to be spent a little bit in the woodshed with our product team. That’s kind of an agreement we had going into this whole deal, that I could spend this time really working.

I have a passion for UI design and how folks interact with our products, catching hackers, all that. If you think about an MSP—the person that’s going to use our product—they have 35 to 40 different UIs to look at.

So one area where I’m going to spend my time is making sure in all of our posturing, everything is just fast, simple and communicates really effectively, really quickly. That’s a passion of mine. And I spend so much time with the MSPs, I think they get that really good feedback loop to feed into our product teams and innovation team.

The second area where I want to spend my time is really the [Blackpoint Response Operations Center]. I was just at our BROC leadership off-site. So the BROC is our response ops center. So that has the SOC that does our MDR, and that also has our adversary pursuit group that’s doing our threat intelligence and threat research. I want to be able to spend more time with them, brainstorming cool, new, novel ways to test our own SOC.

And then, more importantly, I want to be on the road. I mean, I’m already out on the road an insane amount. I want to be able to spend more quality time with our MSP partners, or future partners, and really help work together to grow. I think that’s an area that’s a passion of mine. I want to do that.

Then the fourth area, which is something we don’t advertise too much, but we like to do charity work and philanthropy type stuff. And I want to do more of that. And specifically, we came out of the intelligence world. We have a lot of folks from the military world and law enforcement. It’s an interest of mine,to make sure that we can use our Blackpoint platform for good and continue to do a lot more volunteering. That’s something I really want to see this company doing more of. And I know Gagan is committed to that as well.

How do you look at the average MSP and the threat that it faces? How big is that? And how prepared is the environment? I feel like MSPs are a lot more prepared now than they were in 2018—there has been a lot of sort of maturity that’s come along. But you’re in a much better position to talk about this than I am.

We entered this market in about 2019 and, yes, it was like, some crappy AV [antivirus] and a firewall was about the state of the market. It’s changed dramatically. This is what I’m seeing right now. We invented MDR for Microsoft 365. We’re the first ever to do it.

And right now, for everyone on-premises, we’ve saved what could have turned into ransomware, big data theft or something like that, we’re doing 30 cloud saves. We’re doing 700 saves a month right now with a 30-to-1 ratio cloud to on-premises.

And here’s some interesting stats—and these are not marketing things, this is straight from our SOC—but we integrate with every major what we’re kind of calling ‘traditional EDRs.’ Now, the game is changing a lot, where 70 percent of the time when we’re having to respond and save a customer on-premises, we’re getting no alerts from the integrated EDR. We’re an EDR, obviously, we just do it differently.

But I think there is a complacency right now in the market that the EDRs that are out there are going to save the day. What’s happened is that hackers have shifted, actually, to using a lot of IT tools to get around the EDR.

So you just use legit tools that can get around [that EDR] and you steal credits. That’s something we’re really good at catching. So I think there’s a lot of complacency that, ‘Hey, I got a top EDR, and I’m monitoring my EDR. It’s good enough.’

It’s just not anymore. We see it every day. I think the area where there’s a huge gap is really on the cloud side. The vast majority of companies in the world and MSPs do not have active detection response to their cloud environments. Yet during COVID we moved so much of the workload to the cloud, so I think that’s an area.

We focus heavily on posture management of Microsoft. 365. You’re going to see Blackpoint take a huge leading role on that. The ability to configure baselines, alert on drift, all that type of stuff is absolutely critical when we’re putting so much of our operations into cloud workflows at this point, and specifically on the Microsoft side. So that’s kind of what I’m seeing right now in the market.

And so for us, as we look at our CompassOne platform, it’s all about attack surface reduction. A lot of focus on the monitoring of the attack surface reduction after you do it to make sure that just because you do it once doesn’t mean changes aren’t going to be made and you’re going to not expose vulnerabilities in the future. And then a huge focus on our reporting and APIs. And then lastly, how we started in this world, which is our hardcore detection response.

In the press release, you mentioned one of the reasons you brought Singh on board is to help manage acquisitions. Can you tell me how you are thinking about acquisitions and what area you are looking at?

I would say two broad areas. We are always looking for kind of needle-moving tech. Could be a simple algorithm to enrich fidelity on a response operation. It could be something like that. I have looked at some companies. I passed on most of them.

The other area we’re looking at is companies that are, on the revenue side, working in our space, that have our ideal kind of customer profile, but we think we could probably bring our toolset in to make a lot more improvements in the offering.

We’re looking both from the expansion standpoint on revenue, and we’re looking on the tech side. I can’t say there’s anything specific. And frankly, I probably wouldn’t say, but I can tell you right now I don’t have anything specific I’m looking at.

One question MSPs will ask me when I call to ask about an announcement is ‘What does this mean to me? Why should I care?’ So to throw that back at you now, what? Why? Why should MSPs get excited about this leadership change?

I think No. 1 because I’m the founder of this company, and I’m super excited about it. To me, it’s the right move for Blackpoint. It’s the right move for me personally.

I think what made us special was we had, from the top down, a ton of focus on product. And as you grow, it can pull you away from that a little bit. And I still think this is such a ground game. So for me, what I really look at is we just have an amazing leader who’s got a lot of skills maybe I don’t have.

On the business side, it allows me to focus my time and effort where I think my skills contribute the most to Blackpoint, which to me is product, SOC, and also being the leading face in person for this company, and that’s not changing right now. I’m just getting kind of back to my basics and where I came from when I started this company.