Andy Simko

The Arc

In 2005, I moved to Iowa and couldn't get the food I grew up on in Chicago delivered anywhere. I saw the opportunity. I had no way to build it. Goldbelly solved it years later.

In 2007, I had a drawer full of gift cards I couldn't do anything with. Same thing — clear gap, no path to close it. GCX came along and did exactly what I'd imagined.

I kept seeing these moments. Opportunities that felt obvious, solutions I could articulate, but no system to bridge the distance between I see it and it exists.

So I stopped waiting for one and started building it.

Over the next fifteen years, I deliberately acquired every capability I was missing — offensive security to understand how systems break, systems engineering to formalize how they're built, product management to translate insight into outcomes, data platforms to power the decisions, and AI strategy to see where it's all heading.

None of it was random. Every role, every certification, every tour of duty filled a specific gap in the system I was assembling. The goal was always the same: never again see something worth building and not have the tools to build it.

The Proof

Twenty years of seeing it first.

01 — The Map

Selling computers at Best Buy during college, I noticed customers carrying home wireless routers and plugging them in wide open. So I printed a war-driving map of unsecured home networks in West Des Moines and showed people what their neighbors were exposing. My in-home installation numbers went to the top, and one weekend our department ranked third in the nation.

02 — The Flood

Managed services were still new when I built my first MSP practice, colocating data and key services for about ten client companies. In 2008, the Cedar Rapids flood kept one of them out of their office for three months. They didn't lose a thing — everything they needed was reachable over VPN.

03 — The Banks

I built SHAZAM Secure from zero: managed security for community financial institutions. It started with what customers asked for — security awareness and vulnerability assessments. Then I realized the phishing work was really attack surface mapping, and that the pieces added up to penetration testing: enterprise-grade, sized for small institutions. Nobody had asked for it. A few years later, the auditors started recommending it.

04 — The Thesis

Barracuda hired me after learning I was using their training product — as a customer — to run penetration tests. I grew it at a 26.5% revenue CAGR, built the company's first customer journey framework, and set the platform's next-generation strategy on one idea: that email threats, user behavior and training were really a single picture of human risk. The category's leaders have since moved there.

05 — The Cut

Then I moved into the engine room, building the company's data foundation. When it came to governance, the textbook version was built for enterprises. I rebuilt it around how the company actually runs — on half a person's time. Two years later, it's still running.

The Pattern

The same move, every time.

A security gap nobody on the sales floor was naming. Small companies without enterprise infrastructure. Community banks without access to real testing. Signals that belonged together, measured apart. A governance program too big to survive contact.

Every one started as something obvious that nobody had built yet. The work is always the same: see the gap first, then build what fills it — shaped for the people who actually need it.

The Combination

Why this works

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Offensive Security

How attackers exploit human psychology

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Systems Engineering

Translating insight into product architecture

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Human-Centered Design

Driving adoption, not just compliance

Products that address root causes — not symptoms.

Strategic Foundation

Built to go deep

Certifications

CISSP — Information Security

CISA — Information Systems Audit

PMC-Level III — Pragmatic Institute

In Progress (2025–2026)

OSIR — Offensive Security Incident Response

OSTH — Threat Hunting

OSDA — Security Operations & Defense Analysis

Cornell Executive Certificates

Systems Thinking

Systems Design

Design Thinking

AI Strategy

Product Management

Built With

Claude AINext.jsReact Tailwind CSSVercelGitHub DatabricksPythonSQL

The Ethos

Help others get there first.

Everything I've built exists because I believe the hardest problem isn't having the idea — it's having the system to get it from I see it to it exists.

I didn't build these tools just for myself. I built them because I know what it feels like to see the destination clearly and have no map to get there. People feel it. Teams feel it. Entire organizations feel it.

My approach is simple: help the people around me succeed first. If I do that well — if I give them the frameworks, the clarity, the system to move — the rest takes care of itself.

I'm not done. The fundamentals are here — a way to tell whether something is worth pursuing, and the discipline to take it from conviction to outcome.