Lacework appointed Jay Parikh as co-CEO on July 27, 2021, pairing the former Facebook vice president and head of engineering and infrastructure with David “Hat” Hatfield. The move was designed to combine Parikh’s experience scaling complex technology infrastructure with Hatfield’s focus on business strategy, operations, business development, and market expansion.
This is a historical appointment, not a current 2026 hiring announcement. Fortinet announced an agreement to acquire Lacework in June 2024 and completed the acquisition on August 1, 2024.
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What happened at Lacework?
Lacework recruited Jay Parikh as co-CEO on July 27, 2021. Parikh also joined the company’s board after first becoming a Lacework adviser in May 2021. The appointment came as the cloud-security company was expanding rapidly and seeking to scale its product, engineering, infrastructure, and platform operations.
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The headline description of Parikh as a “Facebook Engineer Lead” understates his role. Lacework described him as Facebook’s VP and head of engineering and infrastructure. CRN reported that he held senior Facebook engineering responsibilities from November 2009 through February 2021.
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Parikh did not simply replace an existing CEO in the usual sense. He joined Hatfield in a co-CEO structure. CRN reported that Dan Hubbard had moved from CEO to chief product officer earlier in 2021.
Lacework’s announcement said the arrangement was intended to divide leadership according to each executive’s strengths.
Why Parikh’s infrastructure background mattered
Lacework’s strategic argument was that modern cloud security is partly a problem of data, automation, and scale. Cloud environments generate enormous amounts of information across accounts, workloads, containers, identities, applications, networks, and infrastructure. A security platform must collect and interpret that data without creating unmanageable volumes of manual rules and alerts.
Parikh had experience leading organizations responsible for infrastructure at Facebook scale. Lacework credited his teams with work spanning:
- physical infrastructure and data centers;
- servers, networking, and subsea cables;
- software, data, and artificial-intelligence systems;
- security systems; and
- industry initiatives including the Open Compute Project and Telecom Infra Project.
Lacework also said Facebook grew from approximately 300 million users to more than 3 billion during the relevant period. That is a company-provided characterization of the scale Parikh’s organization supported, not proof that he personally built every system or independently caused that growth.
The relevant connection was therefore not that Facebook experience automatically made Parikh a cybersecurity specialist. Rather, Lacework was hiring an executive familiar with distributed systems, global infrastructure, platform development, and the operational complexity that cloud-security customers face.
How the co-CEO structure was supposed to work
| Executive | Announced responsibilities |
|---|---|
| Jay Parikh | Product, engineering, infrastructure, innovation, research, and platform development |
| David “Hat” Hatfield | Business strategy, business development, market expansion, and operations |
| Vikram Kapoor | Founder and CTO, continuing to help carry forward Lacework’s technical vision |
Hatfield and Parikh had previously worked together at Akamai, and Lacework said their professional relationship and friendship extended back more than 20 years. That history helped explain why the company believed two executives could share the top job.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesIn practical terms, the model separated the technology and product challenge from the commercial and operating challenge. Parikh was expected to help build the platform and engineering organization, while Hatfield concentrated on customers, business development, strategy, operations, and geographic or market expansion. Lacework said the two would collaborate on major decisions, strategy, company culture, and broader company-building.
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That division offered a potential advantage: each leader could focus on a narrower set of problems. It also created a governance risk. Co-CEOs can produce unclear decision rights, competing priorities, or slower escalation unless the board and executive team know who has final authority in each area.
Lacework’s position in 2021
The appointment came during an aggressive growth phase. According to figures in Lacework’s own announcement, the company said that in the first quarter of 2021:
- revenue had tripled year over year;
- new customers had increased fivefold;
- nearly half of new customer wins were competitive takeouts;
- employee growth had increased by nearly 300% year over year; and
- the company had recorded eight consecutive quarters of sequential revenue growth.
These figures should be read as Lacework’s reported growth claims, not as independently audited performance data established by the appointment announcement.
CRN reported that Lacework was founded in 2015, had raised approximately $599 million through four outside funding rounds by July 2021, and had grown to nearly 600 employees based on LinkedIn and Crunchbase information. Later in 2021, CRN reported that Lacework raised another $1.3 billion at an $8.3 billion valuation. That later financing is useful context for the company’s expansion, but it does not prove that the co-CEO arrangement itself produced those results.
What Lacework meant by cloud security
Lacework positioned its platform as a cloud-first security system covering the development lifecycle through runtime. Its announcement described capabilities involving build-time and run-time security, threat detection, behavioral anomaly detection, cloud compliance, workloads, containers, and Kubernetes services across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
The company emphasized several connected ideas:
- Data-driven detection: using cloud telemetry to identify unusual behavior and potential threats.
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence: applying automated analysis rather than relying only on manually authored rules.
- Behavioral analytics: looking for deviations from expected activity.
- Automation: reducing investigation and remediation work for security teams.
- DevSecOps integration: connecting security findings with engineering and development workflows.
This positioning placed Lacework in a rapidly expanding cloud-security market where cloud posture management, workload protection, container security, application security, identity analysis, and automated response were increasingly converging. The product descriptions were Lacework’s positioning claims, not independent evidence that its platform was superior to competing products.
Why the appointment could help—and where it could fail
Potential benefits
- Infrastructure credibility: Parikh brought experience with globally distributed systems and physical infrastructure operating at extraordinary scale.
- Technical recruiting: His reputation could help Lacework attract senior infrastructure, platform, data, and security engineers.
- Product alignment: His background was adjacent to Lacework’s focus on telemetry, automation, data systems, and behavioral analysis.
- Executive capacity: A division between technology leadership and commercial operations could give each co-CEO more time to execute.
- Enterprise confidence: Large customers and investors could view a former hyperscale infrastructure executive as evidence that Lacework understood production complexity.
Risks and limitations
- Infrastructure is not the same as cybersecurity: Running large technology systems does not by itself demonstrate success building, selling, or operating a security product.
- Hyperscaler-to-startup transition: Facebook had resources, capital, talent density, and organizational infrastructure unlike those available to a venture-backed company.
- Co-CEO ambiguity: Shared leadership can make priorities and accountability less clear.
- Reputation versus execution: Recruiting a prominent executive is a strategic signal, not proof of product-market fit, customer retention, or long-term financial success.
- Competitive pressure: Lacework had to differentiate in a crowded market against established security vendors and other cloud-native specialists.
The appointment therefore represented an ambitious operating thesis: Lacework believed infrastructure-scale engineering could become a competitive advantage in cloud security. It did not, by itself, establish that the thesis worked.
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What happened afterward?
Fortinet announced an agreement to acquire Lacework on June 10, 2024. At that point, Fortinet identified Parikh as Lacework’s CEO rather than describing the original 2021 two-person co-CEO arrangement.
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Fortinet said it intended to integrate Lacework’s cloud-native application protection capabilities into its broader security portfolio. The acquisition was completed effective August 1, 2024, according to Fortinet’s completion announcement.
The later transaction changes how the 2021 appointment should be understood. It was a milestone in Lacework’s pre-acquisition expansion, not evidence that Lacework remains an independent startup with the same leadership structure in 2026. The available sources do not establish Parikh’s exact post-acquisition title or current employment status, so those details should not be inferred.
Bottom line
Lacework’s decision to hire Jay Parikh as co-CEO was an attempt to bring Facebook-scale infrastructure experience into a cloud-security company built around data, automation, and behavioral analysis. The co-CEO model paired that technical and platform focus with Hatfield’s commercial and operational responsibilities.
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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11The appointment was strategically understandable, but it was not proof of security-market leadership or business success. The clearest long-term outcome established by the available record is that Fortinet agreed to acquire Lacework in 2024 and completed the deal on August 1 of that year.
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