Kristin Judge is a former Washtenaw County Commissioner elected in 2008, who has also worked as Director of Government Affairs at the National Cyber Security Alliance where she worked with Google, the FTC, FBI, SBA, DHS, and NIST to educate the public on how to protect sensitive data. As such she was the perfect person to run the CyberCrime Support public-private collaboration that helps consumers and businesses after they have been the target of cyber-fraud at FraudSupport.org.
On the day we met him, local IT security tech consultant Tim Marsh was on the phone dealing with a data breach for Equifax. He’s a consultant with 20 years of experience working in Fortune10 IT including working for Ford, Hewlett Packard, and GE most recently. But that’s not all he does. In addition to his work as founder of consultancy ApprenTek, Tim Marsh recruits young local talent out of Michigan colleges like Eastern Michigan, the University of Michigan, Concordia, Western, and Michigan Tech for Fortune500 tech support jobs. “I recruit for Fortune500 companies for short-term engagements,” he tells us, “and also local recruiting for young people getting into tech support.”
In a maze of buildings on the University of Michigan’s North Campus in Ann Arbor, the Venture Accelerator, startup hub for intellectual property spun off by the Office of Tech Transfer from research and faculty at the University of Michigan, sits quietly on the block that used to be owned by Pfizer. Diane Bouis, Innovation Program Manager at the Venture Accelerator, helps these new ventures find resources and space in the many labs and offices housed in the building where the Venture Accelerator hosts new companies. The Venture Center, Accelerator, and Office of Tech Transfer work in close conjunction here to support baby startups in life sciences in particular to get out into the world.
Several months ago during our launch, Cronicle interviewed Censys co-founder David Adrian to hear about how a University of Michigan student went from falling into a research project to avoid a machine learning class to having 30,000 customers. Since that interview, Censys has expanded into their first-floor suite on Ann Arbor’s Main Street from the second floor, planned a security-themed tech talk for the fall with a colleague from Palo Alto, expanded from 15 people to 28, and just publicly announced their new Censys Enterprise platform tool that curates data sets for users so they don’t have to wait 10 months for a data scientist to analyze the massive amount of information Censys can deliver about their servers, domains, and other assets online.
It’s not every undergraduate student who falls into a research project in order to avoid a machine learning class, and shortly has 30,000 customers, but that’s what happened to David Adrian of Censys. Which isn’t to say he isn’t brilliant and hard-working. He definitely has that whiz kid mannerism about him, and he knows his…
