By Katie E. Ismael
Jason Oberg (MA ’12, PhD ’14) is the co-founder and CEO of Tortuga Logic, a San Jose-based cybersecurity company specializing in hardware threat detection and prevention. He’s a leading expert in hardware security whose work has been cited over 1,000 times and been granted six issued and pending patents.
But the roots of these accomplishments go back to the halls of UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department, where “wacky ideas,” unique and innovative ways of thinking and tremendous intellectual power combined to make a start-up dream a successful reality.
CSE and UC San Diego not only sparked the entrepreneurial spirit behind the company but played a major role in its founding. Its technology is based on previous research Oberg carried out as a PhD student in the lab of CSE Professor Ryan Kastner. And it’s been steered by a team of pioneers in the hardware security space that include Kastner and Tim Sherwood, a UC Santa Barbara computer science professor who is also a CSE alumnus (MS, PhD ’03).
Free beer, “wacky ideas” and some of the brightest minds in the field
Oberg, who earned his undergraduate degree at UC Santa Barbara, says he was attracted to UC San Diego’s CSE department because it has some of the brightest minds in the field with a wide depth of expertise.
“My skills were at a really interesting intersection of hardware design and cybersecurity and it is difficult to find computer science departments that have such strong expertise in both of those areas,” he says. “The open and collaborative atmosphere between different groups and teams was also a huge bonus.”
On the social side, he recalls “many fond memories of free beer during our weekly graduate student social hours and playing hours of Street Fighter and NBA Jam on the arcade machine in Chez Bob, our communal break room.”
“Not only did this help me in building lasting relationships with friends but provided a very unique environment to discuss completely wacky ideas. Wacky ideas often lead to the best research topics,” he reflects.
And on the academic front, he recalls there was never a shortage of innovation and unique ideas either.
“I have several fond memories of discussing security-related aspects of programming languages, theory, entire systems, and hardware,” he says. “Getting access to experts across all domains was always just a few offices away. It’s really hard to find that type of intellectual power in one building.”
From that environment, where innovation and free thinking was allowed to flourish, Tortuga Logic emerged.
Oberg’s PhD advisors, Kastner and Sherwood, had been seeing the market need for hardware security grow significantly over the years, Oberg recalls.
What really kick-started their initiative, he says, was participating in National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, which provides a small amount of funding to universities to conduct customer discovery and identify whether there is a market for the technology, what product would best serve that market and how to best go-to-market.
Following the completion of I-Corps, Oberg says the team saw a clear path to market and took the leap to start the company.
In the early days of Tortuga Logic, Oberg remarks that UC San Diego offered a variety of helpful resources to help start a company. He cites work the team did with the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center during their NSF I-Corps for providing business mentorship and guidance.
“Those resources were really invaluable in helping us shape the necessary business mindsets for starting the company,” he says.
Extreme Risks, and Rewards
In 2017, the company became positioned for new growth. Thanks to an infusion of capital from the venture-capital firm Eclipse Ventures, Tortuga Logic received $2 million in seed funding to accelerate engineering efforts and expand sales and marketing.
“There is an enormous amount of software-based cybersecurity companies in the world, but with the advent of autonomous vehicles, growing complexity of mobile devices and trust issues in the supply chain for military applications, there is a gaping hole in how the industry approaches cybersecurity—specifically the hardware,” Oberg said in a story in the online publication TechCrunch about the funding.
With several years now under his belt as a company co-founder and CEO, Oberg offers some advice to others with an entrepreneurial spirit.
“Starting your own company is extremely tough,” he says. “There is a lot of allure around being a start-up founder with the huge successes we see in the public market. But the struggles cannot be overstated.”
He notes that leaders should be prepared to tackle everything from raising money to hiring the right team to driving the vision and plan and then keeping things on course through the successes and failures.
“For those considering starting their own company, you really have to accept that you have an extremely high likelihood of failure and be completely comfortable with that. More than 1 out of 10 startups fail,” he says.
But the flip side is that with extreme risk comes huge rewards, he notes. And he’s prepared for the swings.
“I am very happy with the progress our team at Tortuga Logic has made thus far and extremely excited about the opportunities ahead. No matter how hard or easy they will be.”