‘After a four-year adventure at AWS and about eight years at some of the big companies, I needed to get back to my roots,’ says Dan Candee, new CEO of Cork. ‘I needed to be back in the startup and entrepreneurial mindset. I needed to be working with partners day in day out. I needed to be on customer calls, partner calls, service calls and I needed to be listening constantly.’

Cyber warranty firm Cork Protection has tapped former Amazon Web Services executive Dan Candee to lead the company as CEO.

Carlson Choi, who has served as Cork’s founding CEO since launching in 2023, has moved into the chief product and technology officer role for the company.

“With Dan, it’s almost a duplicate with the way our passion is for really listening to the partner on what their needs are,” Choi told CRN in an exclusive interview.

He added that Candee will help the company accelerate its ongoing partner adoption.

Candee started his first business in 1997 and spent more than 30 years growing small and midsize organizations. He spent eight years at AWS and Dell Technologies leading strategy, channel, go-to-market and operations. Most recently, he served as chief business officer at cybersecurity company Todyl.

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“After a four-year adventure at AWS and about eight years at some of the big companies, I needed to get back to my roots,” Candee told CRN. “I needed to be back in the startup and entrepreneurial mindset. I needed to be working with partners day in day out. I needed to be on customer calls, partner calls, service calls and I needed to be listening constantly.”

He said his vision for Cork is to ensure its partners can deliver business continuity to their customers. To help with that, Cork has made significant platform investments and has launched Cork 2.0 this week.

Cork 2.0 includes advanced features like business email compromise compliance reporting and endpoint pricing to boost its cyber intelligence and smart cyber warranty solutions. The company has also partnered with DataStream Cyber Insurance to deliver end-to-end cyber warranty and cyber insurance protection to MSPs and the businesses they serve.

“I’m in my first week so I’m digging in and listening and learning,” Candee said. “It’s really impressive how much effort has been put in to listening to MSPs. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been so excited to be on this side now and to start digging into the platform and understanding how we can help all of the MSPs.”

He said he’s “in love” with Cork because it can provide instant value to MSPs and their end users.

“When I look at the cybersecurity insurance market, there’s a lot happening there. They’re trying their darndest to be able to support MSPs and clients, but it’s also a bit of a Wild West scenario,” he said. “When I see the value of the Cork warranty combined with the insights provided by the platform, we can do so much to provide instant value for MSPs and small and medium-size businesses today. We can help them understand the health of the clients and their risk profile.”

Cork 2.0 extends the capabilities of its cyber intelligence and enhanced cyber warranty offerings to help MSPs protect their customers from evolving threats while growing their business and driving profitability through new revenue streams.

“Cork 1.0 is a great success platform from where we stand,” Choi said. “Now we got to get 2.0 and I want it to be faster and quicker for what the partner needs. That’s why we made this change. You’re going to see me mostly focusing on getting this company to accelerate faster.”

Over the next 12 months, Candee will be meeting with partners and understanding what Cork can be doing for them and making those investments to better serve them.

“It’s making sure that we are helping with this incredibly robust security posture and helping them make sense of all of the insights and the messages coming through from clients,” he said. “As we help them simplify that, we’re also here to make sure that there’s business continuity as well.”