Joel de la Garza

Joel de la Garza is a partner focused on information security related investments and other chaos adjacent businesses. He believes information security is getting better with security products that combine usability and security, the move to the cloud, the rise of hardware-based multi-factor authentication, and other trends.

Prior to a16z, he was the chief security officer at Box, where he joined post Series B and scaled up through post IPO. From 2007 to 2013, Joel was the global head of Threat Management and Cyber Intelligence for Citigroup, where he built the first open and closed source intelligence center outside of the defense industrial base. He also ran incident response for Deutsche Bank and founded and worked at assorted security startups. He attended Stanford University where he studied Computer Science and German.