Zachary Eikenberry

Zachary “Zach” Eikenberry is an American entrepreneur and business executive based in Lakeland, Florida. He is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hook Security Co., a cybersecurity training company that uses psychological security (PsySec) to help organizations reduce cyber risk. With over 15 years of startup experience, Zach has built and led organizations across federal contracting, SaaS, education, and cybersecurity. He holds degrees in Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Economics from Purdue University.

Hook Security is a psychological security awareness training company co-founded by Zach Eikenberry in 2021. The company creates security awareness training that employees actually enjoy by applying the principles of Psychological Security (PsySec)—combining research in psychology, neuroscience, and education to train employees to recognize and respond to online manipulation. Hook Security offers managed phishing simulations, monthly training videos, reporting and analytics, and works primarily through channel partners including MSPs, MSSPs, VARs, agents, and distributors. The company is trusted by over 500 partners and enterprises.

PsySec, short for Psychological Security, is a training methodology pioneered by Hook Security. It represents a new category in cybersecurity that focuses on protecting the human mind from psychological manipulation. PsySec uses humor, repetition, a positive approach, and the latest neuroscience research to train the amygdala—the part of the brain responsible for threat recognition and response. Unlike traditional security awareness training that relies on fear and punishment, PsySec creates training content that employees genuinely enjoy, making the learning voluntary and therefore more effective.

Zach earned three degrees from Purdue University in 2007: a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies, and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Krannert School of Management. He also studied Spanish Language and Literature at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico from 2004 to 2005. In 2021, he completed the Newchip Accelerator program to further support his entrepreneurial ventures.

The NEXT Schools was a network of public charter schools in Greenville, South Carolina, founded by Zach Eikenberry at the age of 27. He served as the Founding CEO and Chairman of the Board beginning in 2011. The schools were centered on entrepreneurial, project-based learning where students were encouraged to start real businesses, form LLCs, raise capital, and pursue patents. Starting with zero initial funding, Zach built an operating system that raised more than $5 million annually, managed over 60 full-time employees, and delivered entrepreneurial programs to more than 900 students across two high schools and a middle school. He retired from NEXT High School in 2018.

Hook Security takes a fundamentally different approach by treating employees as a company’s biggest asset rather than its weakest link. Traditional training often uses fear, tricks, and gotcha-style phishing tests that make employees afraid of their inbox. Hook Security instead leads with positivity, humor, and encouragement. Their training videos are short, funny, and educational—matched to real-world phishing simulations each month. After 12 months of training, employees are reported to be 70% less likely to fall prey to a phishing attack. Zach’s philosophy is simple: “Train. Don’t trick.”

Before Hook Security, Zach had a diverse entrepreneurial career. He became the Owner of Ike Enterprises in 2009 and a Senior Partner at FCD Inc., a Veteran Owned Small Business specializing in federal channel sales and government contract management. In 2010, he co-founded Ledger Work Inc., a contract management tool for streamlining purchasing workflows for federal agencies. In 2011, he founded NEXT High School and also served as Sales Director at CPT Medical. In 2018, he co-founded Ike & Erson before eventually launching Hook Security in 2021 with co-founders Adam Anderson and Brad Powell.

Zach co-hosts the Two Stones One Bird Podcast, which he launched in 2022. On the podcast, he debates ideas and shares insights on a wide range of topics, from entrepreneurship and cybersecurity to philosophy and innovation. The show reflects his broad intellectual background spanning economics, philosophy, and entrepreneurship, and serves as a platform for exploring big ideas and challenging conventional thinking.

Zach is a member of InfraGard (joined 2022), a partnership between the FBI and the private sector for critical infrastructure protection, as well as RevGenius (joined 2020), a community that fosters collaboration among go-to-market professionals. He has been recognized as one of the Top Ten Most Innovative Educators and was named among Greenville Business Magazine’s Best and Brightest as well as their 50 Most Influential. He is also a TEDx speaker and conference speaker on topics including innovation, education, and organizational change.

Zach’s stated mission is to solve big problems, create new market categories, and maximize liberty. At Hook Security, this translates into a goal of helping one million employees recognize and respond to online manipulation. He believes in pursuing radical ideas rather than scaling back vision just to attract investors, and has advocated for broadening horizons and creating leverage points for local relationships. His educational philosophy—treating students as peers and professionals rather than passive learners—carries over into his cybersecurity work, where Hook Security treats employees as partners in building a security-aware culture rather than problems to be fixed.