From Developer Pain to Product-Market Fit: StackHawk’s Founding Story - StackHawk

In this episode, we sit down with Joni Klippert, founder and CEO of StackHawk - a company on a mission to make application security testing part of the developer workflow.Joni shares her fascinating journey from a non-technical MBA grad to becoming a key player in the DevOps and cybersecurity world. After cutting her teeth at early-stage startups and leading product at VictorOps (later acquired by Splunk), Joni saw a critical gap in security: traditional tools weren’t keeping pace with the speed of modern software development.That insight sparked the idea for StackHawk - a dynamic application security testing (DAST) platform designed for developers. Built to be fast, language-agnostic, and easy to use, StackHawk empowers teams to find and fix vulnerabilities before code hits production. From whiteboarding ideas in her living room to building a product used by enterprises, Joni walks us through how StackHawk was born, why the name matters, and what’s coming next — including API discovery and sensitive data detection.If you're building or securing modern applications, this is one conversation you don't want to miss.This episode of CyberBytes: The Podcast is sponsored by Costanoa Ventures. Joni's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joniklippert/StackHawk - https://www.linkedin.com/company/stackhawk/Joseph's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/stackhawk/Aspiron Search - https://www.linkedin.com/company/aspiron-search/Costanoa Ventures - https://www.linkedin.com/company/costanoa-ventures/