ORBIE Leadership Award recipient: For Ballistic Ventures Partner Phil Venables, persistence pays off

Phil Venables has spent his career protecting some of the world’s most critical systems. When asked what hardship taught him about leadership, his answer is just three words: “Persistence pays off.”

That conviction has carried Venables, now a Partner at Ballistic Ventures, through a career of firsts and eventually being inducted into the Chief Security Officer Hall of Fame.

A Commodore VIC-20 and a head start

Venables grew up in Leeds and York in the United Kingdom. His path into technology began at age 10, when he got a Commodore VIC-20 home computer and taught himself to program. “It all started there,” he said.

That early start led to a string of engineering roles in which software met the physical world: process control systems for coal mines at British Coal Research and Development, sonar guidance systems for defense at Logica Space and Defense, and oil rig platform controls at Conoco Oil. At Standard Chartered Bank, he worked on the security for one of the world’s first Internet banking systems.

He holds undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in computer science, formal methods and cryptography from the University of York and The Queen’s College at Oxford.

Building security from scratch

At Goldman Sachs, Venables was a Partner and the firm’s first CISO, a role he held for 17 years, building security, risk, resilience, and privacy programs and pioneering many innovations in modern security. He later served as Chief Operational Risk Officer, an operating partner in the firm’s private equity business, and a board director of Goldman Sachs Bank.

At Google Cloud, he again became the first CISO, building the program from scratch and driving a strategy of secure products, not just security products.

From 2021 to 2025, he served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology at the White House, where his work contributed to a landmark report on cyber-physical resilience that led to many positive changes. Today, at Ballistic Ventures, he backs the next generation of cybersecurity companies.

A legacy of leaders

When asked about his greatest achievements, Venables points first to people. He has created career and professional development environments at multiple organizations that have produced hundreds of professionals who are now CISOs in their own right.

He is also proud of helping create industry bodies that advance security, including FS-ISAC, the Center for Internet Security and the Coalition for Secure AI, and of years of public service with government agencies and organizations including NIST, MITRE, and the NSA Science of Security Program.

Venables’s board and advisory work spans academia, government, and industry. He serves on the NYU Tandon School of Engineering board, the NYU Stern Volatility and Risk Institute, the NIST Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, the MITRE Security and Technology Advisory Committee, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also sits on the boards of Infoblox, HackerOne, ArmorCode, Above Security and BreachRX, and advises Plaid and Rogo.ai.

He is also the author of the forthcoming book, Scaling Security: The 7 Pillars of Elite Cybersecurity Programs, which chronicles his experience creating the best corporate security programs in the world.

Advice for the next generation

Venables’s guidance for rising IT leaders is direct. “Focus on your strengths not your weaknesses.” Second, don’t just do what you love. “Learn to love or shape to love what you are good at and is useful,” he said.

And third, the lesson that has defined his career: “Be persistent.”