For a dozen years or more, Frank Teruel has been leading a double life professionally.
When he stepped into the CFO slot at Arkose Labs last February, the position was just the latest in a succession of CFO stints that had required him to align C-suite duties with additional responsibilities in a Santa Clara University classroom.
In his teaching mode, Professor Teruel is known to speak quickly, while keeping discussions lively and interesting by injecting real-world knowledge and business insight into his lessons.
Meanwhile, inside the C-suite, Teruel is helping to champion a new chapter of growth designed to turn Arkose into a “Rule of 40” company sometime in 2024.
As far as the perks of leading a split-screen professional life go, Teruel tells us that along the way he has been able to hire many of his students, who have since developed into executives and leaders in their own right. –Jack Sweeney
CFOTL: Tell us about Arkose Labs … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Teruel: Well, if you think about life online, only two things at the heart of every exchange ever matter: Is the other person really the other person? And, Is this person behaving normally within the concept of this transaction?
“We focus on crime-as-a-service companies that are renting out bots to our adversaries” -CFO Frank Teruel
Given the enormity of the data breaches that are out there and, as a result, the concomitant incalculable number of data elements about everyone that are now “public,” bots have taken off, as we know. Robots that take these credentials and stuff them into places to try to commit fraud or try to manipulate text flows or SMS flows—all of these kinds of things
