As CEO of Optiv, Kevin Lynch is at the helm of what he calls a “category of one” company—a term that reflects both its ambitions and its design. Built to cut through the noise of a crowded industry, Optiv blends advisory expertise with its own intelligence platform to help organizations make faster, smarter decisions about cyber risk.
Since joining Optiv in 2020, Lynch has led the rollout of the Optiv Market System: an intelligence platform designed to eliminate noise and increase return on spend for thousands of enterprise clients. “We built Optiv Market System so that we could intelligently serve [clients] against a standard reference architecture,” he said. The tool enables real-time visibility into risk posture across infrastructure, identity, operations, and application security, then aligns those insights with business objectives. “There’s nothing on the planet like this,” he said.
Lynch came to Optiv after two decades at Deloitte, where he oversaw $1.2 billion in global investment, led and doubled the firm’s TMT practice, and helped rewire its strategy and M&A advisory services. Earlier, he served as chief strategy officer at AECOM and held director roles at PwC. The thread running through all of it: large-scale transformation, done decisively.
At Optiv, he spends his time across four domains: strategy, capital allocation, culture, and rhythm. But leadership, for him, isn’t only operational. “I love and embrace the very notion of empowering the next generation of leaders,” he wrote. “When we convene with purpose, exceptional things happen.”
Professionally, Lynch’s mandate is velocity. “In a world where 2/3rds of the world GDP has been digitized, SPEED is the new basis of competition,” he wrote. “And as such the CEO must be the catalyst for the organization achieving a higher clock speed.”
