Nathan Sportsman spends his days running Praetorian, an offensive security firm he founded in Austin in 2010, and his nights, more or less, recording the oral history of hacking before the people who made it die. Those are two jobs. Neither pays the other. He does both anyway.
The company has about 150 employees and a reported ~$42M in annual revenue. It sells the sort of service where you pay a small army of technically alarming people to break into things you paid other people to build, and then to write down, in polite prose, how they did it. Penetration testing, red teaming, attack surface management, continuous threat exposure management - the vocabulary is baroque and the acronyms proliferate, but the underlying trade is old: someone has to check the locks. Praetorian checks the locks.
Sportsman founded it in 2010 and then did something unusual for a technology company in Austin. He didn't raise money. For ten years. In 2020, after a decade of running the business on customer revenue, Praetorian closed a $10M Series A led by McKinsey & Company - not a traditional venture fund, and not a coincidence. The consulting firm and the security firm share a customer profile and a taste for methodical work. It was the first outside check the company had ever taken.
"We're running out of time to tell these stories." - Nathan Sportsman, on why he started 'Where Warlocks Stay Up Late'
The Corpus Christi Origin Story
Sportsman grew up in Corpus Christi and attended Richard King High School, where he took a job at Whataburger. He saved the paychecks. Instead of buying a car, which is what most Texas teenagers do with fast-food money, he bought a computer. There is a temptation, telling this story, to overwrite it with meaning. But it is what it is: a kid picked the computer.
He went to The University of Texas at Austin and took a BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering. Before Praetorian he did technical work at Sun Microsystems, Symantec, and McAfee - the three-course meal of late-1990s and 2000s enterprise security. Somewhere along the way he contributed a chapter to Hacking Exposed, the closest thing the security industry has to a canonical textbook, and filed a U.S. patent. Later he taught ethical hacking as an adjunct professor at his alma mater.
The Ledger
Founder. CEO. CTO. Adjunct professor. Patent holder. Book contributor. Podcast host. Executive producer of a documentary series. He is, on paper, at least seven jobs.
Praetorian, In Numbers
The company has landed on the Inc. 5000 more than once, on the Cybersecurity 500, on CIO's Top 20, and, closer to home, on Austin's "Fastest 50." The reported three-year growth rate is 214%. Sportsman has publicly attributed this to a customer-first orientation, which is the sort of thing every CEO says, and which, if you spend a decade bootstrapping, is the sort of thing you probably actually mean, because there is no other party paying the bills.
He also, unusually for a CEO of a firm this size, retains the title of Chief Technology Officer. Most founders shed the CTO badge sometime around the 50th employee. Sportsman kept it. Praetorian's public bios describe him as responsible for the "innovation and development engine" of the company, which is corporate-speak for: he still cares about the product.
Where Warlocks Stay Up Late
Where Warlocks Stay Up Late
In the summer of 2023, the hacker Kevin Mitnick died. Mitnick had, in the 1990s, become the FBI's most-wanted computer criminal, then, in the 2000s, a legitimate security consultant, then, in the 2010s, a fixture on the conference circuit. Sportsman was watching. It occurred to him, he later said, that a whole cohort of the people who built the field were entering the age where they die.
He decided to record them before they did. The project is called Where Warlocks Stay Up Late. It launched publicly in 2024. The goal is over 200 long-form video interviews with the hackers, defenders, phreaks, and researchers who shaped the underground of the 1980s and 90s, plus an encyclopedia to provide context and an anthropological map to show the connections between groups.
The team is not what you would expect from a CEO's side project. Sportsman brought in an Emmy-winning producer (Matthew Wallis), a filmmaker (Tyson Culver), an anthropologist (Gabriella Coleman, whose work on Anonymous is standard reading in the field), and a historian (Matt Goerzen). These are not people who show up for vanity ventures. The project is being taken seriously by people who take documentary work seriously.
The stated ambition is archival rather than journalistic. Sportsman is not trying to break news about the pioneers of the scene. He is trying to make sure someone talks to them, on camera, at length, while they are still around to be talked to. It is preservationist work in a field that has, historically, been terrible at preserving itself.
The Career, In Order
What He Is Actually Like
There are cybersecurity founders who present as showmen and cybersecurity founders who present as engineers, and Sportsman clearly belongs to the second category. His public writing is technical rather than promotional. His podcast interviews are long. He appears to enjoy the questions more than the applause.
The Warlocks project is, in that sense, in character. It is not a marketing exercise for Praetorian. It does not feature Praetorian's customers. It does not upsell anything. It is a project about other people's stories, produced by a busy CEO on a schedule that suggests he does not sleep very much.
"Praetorian security. Man on the street interviews." - Sportsman, captioning a series of impromptu WWSUL clips
The Bootstrap Argument
The 2020 Series A is worth pausing on, because the "bootstrap for a decade, then take a check" arc is rare in venture-backed tech and rarer in cybersecurity, where the pattern is usually: raise a seed, raise a Series A, raise a B, disappear. Praetorian went the other way. The reason was not ideological. Sportsman has not made a public case against venture capital. He simply built the company on customer revenue until doing so stopped being the fastest way to grow, and then he raised.
The lead investor being McKinsey rather than a traditional cyber-focused VC is itself a signal. McKinsey's clients are large enterprises with regulated security needs. Praetorian's clients are large enterprises with regulated security needs. The overlap is the deal.
Why This Matters, Slightly
Cybersecurity is a field where the vendors tend to look and sound alike. The category has been consolidating for a decade. Praetorian's differentiator is a stubborn insistence on services delivered by senior operators, which is not scalable in the way software is, but which produces reports that customers, apparently, keep buying. That is what a 214% three-year growth rate on a services business looks like.
Sportsman's other project - the documentary - is doing something different. It is treating the hacker subculture as history worth preserving. That treatment is overdue. The people who wrote the first exploits, ran the first BBSes, phreaked the first phones, and eventually built the first commercial security firms are getting older. Most of them have never been recorded at length. Sportsman is trying to fix that while there is still time.
There is a joke to be made that a CEO who founded his company in 2010, kept it independent for a decade, and now spends his evenings on a 200-person documentary might be overcommitted. He probably is. He is also getting the work done.