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While Marcos Torres serves as CFO at cybersecurity company Huntress, don’t let the title fool you. Unlike many of his finance counterparts, his passion for numbers sprang from his love for technology.
Torres started his career as an electrical engineer and went on to found his own IT and operations consulting firm in his native country of Venezuela. Next, he managed an operations team for telecom company Huawei Technologies. While in that role, he saw an opportunity to grow into a stronger leader by pursuing his MBA.
“Coming from an engineering background, understanding math and technology, and having grown up with parents who were attorneys, I decided to find the best of the worlds that I knew to create a powerful combination,” he says. “Having the ability to look at a problem from multiple sides and adjust is what drove me down the path of not just finance but being a true operator and business leader—which covers everything in the world of high-growth businesses.”
After graduating from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, Torres moved on to the publicly traded Pendrell Corporation, which focused on intellectual property (IP) licensing and investments. The role was a perfect fit for Torres: It used his legal knowledge and required him to understand technology and the financial aspects of licensing negotiations.
From there, he continued honing his unique skills in several business, finance, and operations roles, including at ed tech giant Imagine Learning (formerly Edgenuity) and Nava PBC. That journey not only exposed Torres to established, well-run organizations but also showed him what it meant to build a company from the ground up.
“At Nava, I was employee number 30,” Torres reminisces. “Two years later, when I left, we were at 150, and our revenue tripled. I got boots on the ground when the company was tiny. Then you blink twice and can’t remember everyone’s name because you’re growing so fast.
“The majority of a business’s complexity comes when you scale, and most of the time, that means more people,” he continues. “More people mean more coordination. That’s when you start removing yourself from the detailed numbers. That’s the dashboard of your car, which is important, but you still have to look at the road ahead—and the road changes a lot very quickly when you’re in hypergrowth mode.”
Nava’s rapid growth taught Torres to keep his eye on the big picture as a leader of financial and business functions. He applies those lessons at Huntress, relying on muscle memory to replicate his past success. When he joined the organization in 2019 as vice president of finance and operations, he was the fifteenth employee.
“Clarity of vision brings clarity of action. If you’re absolutely clear about your goals and what’s essential to reach them, it makes decisions that much easier down the line.”
Marcos Torres
Now, the organization has a headcount rapidly approaching four hundred and expects to surpass $100 million in revenue in the coming months. The company provides completely managed cybersecurity solutions to the world’s small and midsized businesses. The solutions protect 99 percent of the world’s smaller businesses—which represent the backbone of the global economy—from hackers, who thrive on taking control of business systems and identities and holding them for ransom.
Adaptability has been a primary driver of success at the company, Torres says.
“I’ve always been a big fan of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, which talks about survival of the fittest,” Torres says. “The fittest is not necessarily the strongest, but it is the most adaptable, the one that can change based on the conditions of their environment. I always keep that at the top of my mind in this role.”
To be adaptable, Torres believes a leader must be observant, have great people skills, and have an even better team by his side. “You have to pay attention to the little details, which comes with talking to people. It doesn’t matter how software or technology dependent a business is. You still need people. Understanding those dynamics, and getting a feel for what employees feel and how they are motivated, is critical. That gives you insight into where to pay more attention.”
One area Torres and his team have paid close attention to is the company identity—“what we build, how we build it, and who we serve,” Torres explains. That’s why Huntress specializes in building cybersecurity products for small and midsized enterprises, rather than trying to be everything to everyone,
“Clarity of vision brings clarity of action,” Torres affirms. “If you’re absolutely clear about your goals and what’s essential to reach them, it makes decisions that much easier down the line.”
Besides solidifying that vision, Torres is proud to see the company make strides in other areas. By the beginning of June 2024, Huntress had raised over $350 million to grow the company, reaching a valuation of over $1.5B. To Torres, that achievement indicates a vote of confidence from the financial market that supports the disruptive strategy Huntress is executing.
“A huge accomplishment has been getting the market to understand that what we’re doing is fundamentally different,” he says. “The partnerships we’ve forged in the investment community, what we’ve been able to do with the money we’ve raised, paired with our clarity of vision, makes for a really powerful formula.”
CIBC Innovation Banking congratulates Marcos Torres on his well-deserved acknowledgement as a community and business leader. For over two decades CIBC Innovation Banking has been helping the innovators of today become the market leaders of tomorrow. We provide entrepreneurs with the growth capital they need to scale and grow.
