Company leader
John Ackerly
Co-Founder and CEO
Virtru
John Ackerly is co-founder and chief executive of Virtru, which encrypts email and files and keeps the sender's rules on the data after it leaves. He is a Rhodes Scholar who advised on technology policy at the White House before starting the company with his brother, a former National Security Agency architect.
Growing Up in Washington
He grew up in Washington, D.C., the oldest of three brothers, in a family where each child shared a story from the school day and tied it to a debate in the national news. Summer trips in the United States and abroad gave him an interest in international affairs, and at 16 he spent four months in Moscow studying how glasnost changed the lives of Russian avant-garde artists.
Becoming a Rhodes Scholar
He graduated from Williams College and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Advising the White House on Technology
He was the lead technology policy advisor at the White House National Economic Council before and after the September 11 attacks, and policy and strategic planning director at the U.S. Department of Commerce. "The lack of ability to securely collaborate on data was at the heart of our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks," he said. He is a longtime privacy advocate.
He moved into private equity as an investor at Lindsay Goldberg in New York, working with owners who were scaling companies.
Starting Virtru with His Brother
His youngest brother, Will Ackerly, spent eight years at the National Security Agency and led work on the Trusted Data Format, an open standard for moving data without losing control of who can open it. Once the format was public, Will saw a chance to make end-to-end encryption easy enough for everyday apps, and John left private equity and moved to Washington to start the company with him. Will is its chief architect and holds 25 patents.
They began in 2011 and took three years to win a first customer, in 2014. "Many thought we were crazy in those early years because we were bootstrapping the company without any customers to show for it," he said. By 2020 about 20,000 organizations used Virtru.