WL

William Lin

CEO at AKA Identity | Data-Driven IAM

San Francisco Bay Area

Work Experience

  • Co-Founder, CEO

    2023

    Taking a love of building to the next level and putting all of my eggs in one basket: an IAM startup. We're manifesting the combination: amazing team, delightful solution, scalable company.

  • Co-Creator

    2018

    The Security Tinkerers is a community of professionals to educate, mentor, and generate opportunities for both todays and the next generation of leaders.

  • Creator

    2022

    I wrote a book about Venture Capital after 20,000 hours of experience and learning from hundreds of people that I admire within the ecosystem.

2015 - 2023

  • Venture Partner

    2022 - 2023

    A year of fun between supporting startups, writing about startups and preparing for my next startup!

  • Founding Team, Managing Director

    2015 - 2023

    Started Forgepoint Capital with my co-founders in 2015 to create one of the most active venture capital firms in Cybersecurity.

2021 - 2023

  • Series B Investor

    2021 - 2023

    Problem: Legacy IT Data Security solutions don't scale, are difficult to deploy and manage. Solution: Modern architecture with automated data discovery, classification and lineage. Category: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) & Data Detection & Response (DDR)

2020 - 2023

  • Series A Investor

    2020 - 2023

    Problem: Not enough visibility, consistency and scalable guardrails in cloud environments. Solution: Translate security policies and best practices into code, integrate into development pipelines and enable remediation with visibility. Closest Category: Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

  • Series A Investor

    2020 - 2023

    Problem: Managing end-user entitlements with least privilege principles is unmanageable at scale. Solution: Mix of expertise, automation and services to provide actionable remediation, mature IAM hygiene and minimize credential misuse's blast radius. Closest Category: Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)

  • Founding Investor, Board Advisor

    2019 - 2023

    Problem: Unmanageable data stores in a global and cloud world. Solution: Data classification via ML, graph analysis, access control and response capabilities. Category: Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), Cloud Security & Database Activity Monitoring

2018 - 2023

  • Series A Investor

    2018 - 2023

    Problem: Providing customers a consistent and delightful login across multiple applications. Solution: Leverage pre-built integrations and tokenized credentials to provide an customer identity service to developers. Category: Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)