In Episode 70 of Cyber Security Matters, hosts Harry Baldwin and Matt Rose sit down with Dominik Richter, Co-Founder and CPO of Mondoo, the agentic vulnerability management platform that doesn’t just find security flaws, it actually fixes them. Dom’s journey into cybersecurity started with the 1995 film Hackers (and yes, Angelina Jolie may have played a part), which sent him down a path of learning to break into computers, reading Phrack magazine, and exploring bulletin boards. From there, he built a career spanning Deutsche Telekom, Chef Software, and Google before founding Mondoo.

About the Guest

Dominik Richter is a founder, coder, and hacker who has helped shape the DevOps and security space through projects like Chef InSpec and dev-sec.io. He co-founded VulcanoSec (acquired by Chef Software in 2015), headed security for Deutsche Telekom’s first OpenStack Cloud, and worked at Google Cloud before co-founding Mondoo in 2021. At Mondoo, he leads product as CPO, building an AI-native platform that helps organisations prioritise and remediate vulnerabilities across cloud, on-prem, SaaS, endpoints, and the SDLC.

Key Topics Covered

• How the 1995 film Hackers sparked Dom’s cybersecurity career
• Lessons from building at Deutsche Telekom, Chef Software, and Google and the moments that inspired him to go the startup route (twice)
• The qualities Dom looks for when hiring in startups: no ego, comfort with ambiguity, willingness to be wrong and learn
• How the hiring process has evolved at Mondoo especially for engineers in the AI era, where interviews now include coding with and without AI agents
• The biggest learning curve: hiring salespeople
• The origin of the Mondoo name (German for “moon” tied to their extensible security graph concept)
• How AI is accelerating both attack and defence more code, more vulnerabilities, more automation on both sides
• Where AI falls short: companies rushing to adopt without considering security, particularly around AI agent skills and supply chain risks
• Why coding skills changed “overnight” but the need for people who understand customer problems is greater than ever
• What Mondoo does: agentic vulnerability management focused on prioritisation and remediation, not just scanning and reporting
• How Mondoo uses AI agents for prioritisation (business criticality, blast radius, exploitability) and remediation (producing automation code for tools like Terraform, Chef, Ansible)
• Dom’s advice: don’t be afraid jump into AI, explore, and learn how to solve real problems with modern tools

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