He builds networks that refuse to hold still. As co-CEO of Dispel, he keeps the water plants, factories, and power grids running - quietly, the way a good security system should.
Most people never think about the software that keeps a water treatment plant from being switched off by a stranger on another continent. Ian Schmertzler thinks about little else. As co-CEO and co-founder of Dispel, he spends his days on the unglamorous, high-stakes frontier of operational technology - the valves, pumps, turbines, and programmable controllers that run the physical world.
Dispel's pitch is deceptively simple. Industrial systems were built to last decades, not to fend off modern attackers. When a remote vendor needs to log in to fix a turbine, the old way punched a hole in the firewall and hoped nobody else walked through it. Ian's company replaced that hole with something that keeps moving. The Dispel platform is a zero trust access system built on Moving Target Defense: it constantly tears down and rebuilds the pathway between an operator and a machine, so an attacker can map the network at 9:00 and find it rearranged by 9:01.
The result is the kind of protection that, when it works, looks like nothing happened at all. A maintenance engineer connects, does the job, disconnects. No friction, no theater. The company calls it security that is “present, but never in the way” - a line that doubles as Ian's design philosophy and, depending on the day, his temperament.
Today Dispel serves manufacturers, utilities, building managers, oil and gas operators, and government agencies. It has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor and a leader in a Forrester New Wave report. Ian sits on it all as an industrial engineer first and a security executive second, which is a useful order: he treats a network the way he'd treat a factory floor, as a problem of throughput, bottlenecks, and scale rather than a wall to be made ever taller.
Attack surfaces don't sit still.
Long before there was a company, there was a summer in Scotland. Ian and his brother Ethan, still kids, spent it at a wildlife center nursing injured birds of prey back to health. There were falcons that looked the part and eagles that demanded attention. The brothers bonded instead with Emily, an understated barn owl raised at the facility.
Emily didn't perform. She'd quietly follow the boys around the grounds, and if she decided she liked you, she'd glide over, cling to your arm, and curl up inside your jacket like it was home. Silent. Adaptive. Always a little in motion. Alert without ever making a scene.
Years later, when the brothers sat down to describe what they wanted a security system to feel like, they kept describing the owl. That's the through-line from a Scottish barn to the Dispel Zero Trust Engine: protection that watches everything, moves constantly, and disturbs nothing. The company will happily tell you its core technology was inspired by a rescue bird, which is either a charming founder's tale or the most honest product spec a cybersecurity firm has ever written.
The route between operator and machine is torn down and rebuilt on a rolling basis. Map it once and the map is already wrong.
Coxswain, Yale men's crew. The small voice in the stern who steers the boat and sets the stroke. Listed at 5'8", 127 lbs - built to make everyone else faster.
BA, Yale University. Followed by an MSc in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech.
Finance interlude. Work at the Yale Investments Office and BlackRock's Financial Markets Advisory Group - a crash course in systems that move money at scale.
Dispel is born. Ian and Ethan found the company to put Moving Target Defense to commercial work, raising an early-stage round to get going.
On the record. Ian talks Moving Target Defense on the Waterfall Security OT cybersecurity podcast and keeps a steady speaking cadence, including the SANS Institute.
Still steering. A decade in, Dispel is roughly 86 people and headquartered in Austin, with Ian and Ethan still sharing the CEO seat.
A coxswain doesn't pull an oar. They read the water, call the rhythm, and keep eight stronger people pointed in one direction. It is, on reflection, a strangely accurate job description for running a company.
Security should be present, but never in the way.
His company's flagship technology traces back to a rescued barn owl. Try finding a better product origin story in enterprise software.
He still says his favorite place to be in the morning is on the water in an eight-person shell. Old coxswains never really leave the boat.
Before cybersecurity he sat inside finance, at BlackRock and the Yale Investments Office - then walked away to make turbines harder to hack.
Dispel is a family business in the most literal sense: he and his brother Ethan share the co-CEO title.
He's an industrial engineer by training, which is why he talks about networks in terms of throughput and bottlenecks, not just threats.
New Canaan, Connecticut to Austin, Texas - the accent may not have made the trip, but the discipline did.