By Timothy R. Olsen ’09, ’18 MBA

---

Popular culture has always reflected our hopes, dreams, concerns, and fears as a society, and nowhere may that be truer than the realm of espionage.

The popularity of Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, in both novels and films, along with the Bourne and Mission: Impossible franchises — just to name a few — reflect our fascination with and unease about how intelligence is gathered, guarded, and weaponized.

Information is power, and the way in which governments and corporations protect and acquire that information has long captured our imagination.

That’s certainly true for twin brothers Greg and Eric Levesque, graduates of Utah State University’s Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, who cofounded Strider Technologies in 2019 with Mike Brown. The company uses open-source data to help organizations address state-sponsored intellectual property theft.

Put another way, they use readily available data and proprietary software to help governments and organizations prevent the theft of ideas or inventions by adversarial governments or organizations.

“The espionage game has changed. Nation-states are now fully targeting industry, academia, and government,” Greg explains. “What that means is companies and universities need to get their head around the fact that they have a different problem set than they used to.

“It’s costing them significant amounts of money, trust, and is actually undermining core innovation efforts in our country, like quantum research, fusion technology, battery tech — which we’ve already lost the race for — and now AI. So, in essence, we’re in a tech race for the future.”

Headquartered in Salt Lake City, with offices in Washington, D.C., London, Tokyo, and Sydney, Strider now employs nearly 350 people, operates in 16 countries, and works with seven of the Top 10 Fortune 500 companies. Altogether, it helps protect organizations collectively valued at roughly $22 trillion.

The Levesques — who in 2024 were presented with the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business Professional Achievement Award — say the Beehive state was the clear choice for Strider’s home base.

“This is the best place in the country to build. Let’s just call it what it is,” Greg exclaims. “The community, the support, the talent here — from the state level all the way down. That’s why we wanted to do it. We wanted that network effect and support mechanism, and they have over-delivered.”

TWO PATHS, ONE PURPOSE

Following their time at USU, the brothers — who are the youngest of their parents’ five children — embarked on different paths. These paths sharpened their global perspective and set them on a course for future collaboration.

Greg (’11) earned a graduate degree from Georgetown University and then remained in the D.C. area, working on national security issues before serving as the Business Advisory Manager for the U.S.-China Business Council and cofounding an intelligence firm, Pointe Bello. Eric (’12) started his career in New York City in the Corporate Credit Group at Standard & Poor’s before getting an MBA from BYU. Eventually, he became the lead of the technology investment team at Oman Investment Authority.

Despite these divergent paths, the brothers — who used to go door-to-door hawking knickknacks in the rural Maine woods in which they grew up — always had a dream to start something together. That dream took time to coalesce though. They created a website and LLC for a company to export scrap metal, but that never got off the ground. However, as they continued building experience in their individual careers, they realized there was an opportunity to combine that expertise and fill a need.

“I think we had some unique experiences and perspectives, and we started exchanging that, and then we’re like, ‘OK, you’re seeing this in your finance space. I’m seeing this in the intel, government space — there’s something here,’” Greg remembers.

From those conversations over a roughly 18-month period, things evolved quickly.

“We finally looked at each other and we’re like, ‘Let’s commit to this. We’re going to do it,’” Eric says. “You’re going to leave your job, I’m going to leave my job, and we’re going to figure it out over the next year. The next day, I had a meeting with a guy named Mike Janke and during the meeting, I floated him the idea. We got the term sheet a couple weeks later for $2 million.”

AN EXPANDING WORLDVIEW

Though both Eric and Greg speak glowingly about their time in Logan, their introduction to world politics and life outside of the United States began long before either brother stepped foot on the Utah State campus or studied abroad.

Each served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with Greg going to Taiwan, while Eric traveled to Russia. Greg calls his time abroad a “profound expansion of my reality” and Eric says it really hammered home the premise that in the United States “you can own your life and take full responsibility for your life and its outcomes.”

Both brothers expressed how that experience instilled in them a greater knowledge of how the U.S. is viewed by most of the rest of the world — a special place, a beacon on a hill. It’s also a place where innovation and success create a natural target for competitors seeking an edge.

“As Americans, we have more doors open to us than most. We really do,” Eric exhorts.

Following their missions, the brothers arrived in Logan to pursue degrees in economics. Though they had many influential professors, they specifically noted the impact Dr. Shannon Peterson, Director of Global Programming for the School of Social Sciences, Dr. Jeannie Johnson, the Director of USU’s Center for Anticipatory Intelligence and professor in the Political Science Department, Paul Fjeldsted, a senior lecturer in the Economics and Finance Department, and Dr. Frank Caliendo, the Senior Associate Dean of the Huntsman School, had on their academic and professional pursuits.

“They had such an impact on us and our thinking,” Eric says. “They introduced us to different streams of philosophy and economic and political models. It was a wonderful experience.”

Outside of their studies, the Levesques also enjoyed the “real college town experience” Logan offered. From closing down the library, to purchasing bags of broken Milano cookies from the Pepperidge Farm outlet, to calling Domino’s so many times the workers recognized Greg’s voice — their Aggie experience profoundly shaped them.

“That’s the beauty to me of what Utah State embodies — come with some big ideas but just know you’re going to have to really grind and go prove it,” Eric says. “Everybody at Utah State has that mentality, because nothing’s given. If you want to go do something, you have to be the one to go do it. It’s embodied in all the students. So, that’s a great link to what Utah State is and the experience we’ve had.”

For the Levesques, Utah State isn’t just where they earned degrees — it’s a place where they learned how to think about a complicated world, and their place in shaping it.