A Conversation with Pinellas County’s Private Equity Backed Companies' Leaders

Simon Gregorich has been with PODS for over 13 years and currently holds the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Prior to PODS, Simon was Vice President of Finance for O’Reilly Automotive, Inc. a publicly traded automotive retailer. He also worked for Quality Distribution, Inc. a publicly traded trucking company, as their Vice President and Controller after leaving Discount Auto Parts, Inc., where he was Controller for five years. Simon got his financial start as an auditor with Deloitte & Touche. Simon has a Bachelor of Science in Business and a Masters in Accounting from the University of South Florida.

As the CEO Barry Shevlin has lead Vology Data Systems down a road of rapid sales growth and product expansion. As one of the world’s largest resellers of new and pre-owned networking and telecommunications equipment, Vology is a Juniper Elite Partner and also specializes in Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Avaya, Nortel Networks, Brocade Networks, Life Size Video Conferencing, Palo Alto Networks, Polycom and F5 Networks.

A visionary, who has capitalized on emerging business trends Shevlin, has over the course of his career founded and grown five companies in the technology sectors, ranging from CATV contracting, telecommunications, software and networking sales. His entrepreneurial spirit, foresight, strategic business acumen, sales process planning, team leadership and corporate culture shaping continue to lead Vology to annual revenues in excess of $130 million.

Stu Sjouwerman (pronounced “shower-man”) is the founder and CEO of KnowBe4, Inc., which hosts the world’s most popular integrated Security Awareness Training and Simulated Phishing platform.

A serial entrepreneur and data security expert with more than 30 years in the IT industry, Sjouwerman was the co-founder of Inc. 500 company Sunbelt Software, a multiple award-winning anti-malware software company that was acquired 2010.

Realizing that the human element of security was being seriously neglected, Sjouwerman decided to help organizations manage the problem of cybercrime social engineering tactics through new school security awareness training and founded KnowBe4.

More than 3000 organizations in a variety of industries, including highly-regulated fields such as healthcare, finance, energy, government and insurance have mobilized their end users as a first line of defense using KnowBe4.

Sjouwerman is the author of four books, with his latest being “Cyberheist: The Biggest Financial Threat Facing American Businesses.”

From 1996 through 2011, Stu was the Editor-In-Chief of WServer News, an email newsletter to 100,000+ IT system administrators helping them to keep their systems secure.  Along with his CEO duties, Stu is currently Editor-in-Chief of Cyberheist News, an e-zine tailored to deliver IT security news, technical updates and social engineering alerts to IT professionals.