Skip to content Accessibility statement
Work, volunteering and career planning
HomeStudent homeWork, volunteering and career planningExplore your optionsExplore career ideasWhat do you actually do? Careers podcast

What do you actually do?

A podcast from the Careers and Placements team, released every other week during UG semester-time.

A Career in Cyber Security with Phil Venables

In this episode, Phil Venables, Partner at Ballistic Ventures, explains how early-stage venture capital supports cybersecurity startups. His firm invests in new companies and works closely with founders to develop ideas, build teams, and grow successful businesses. Drawing on his career—from software engineering to senior cybersecurity roles at major organisations including Google—Phil highlights what it takes to succeed in cybersecurity. While the work can be demanding, it offers a strong sense of purpose, as professionals help protect critical systems, businesses, and society from growing digital threats.

Phil's Bio

Phil is a Partner at Ballistic Ventures working on early stage cyber investments Previously, Phil was the first Chief Information Security Officer of Google Cloud where he led the risk, security, compliance, and privacy teams and drove many AI security initiatives. Before joining Google, he was a Partner at Goldman Sachs where he held multiple roles over a long career, initially as their first Chief Information Security Officer, a role he held for 17 years. Prior to this he was in security, engineering, software development roles at a number of defense, energy and finance companies.

Useful links and transcript

 

 

Browse our previous episodes

We've organised our previous episodes into job sectors so you can find the episodes most relevant to you.

Advertising, marketing and PR

Want to know more? Read our job sector information on advertising, marketing and PR.

Charity and voluntary sector

Want to know more? Read our job sector information on the charity and voluntary sector.

Creative industries

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about the creative industries.

Criminal justice

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about criminal justice.

Digital, IT and cyber security

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about digital, IT and cyber security.

Education

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about:

Environment and energy

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about environment and energy.

Finance, consultancy and business

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about finance and consultancy.

Health, healthcare science and social work

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about:

International development

Want to know more? Read our job sector information on international development.

Journalism and publishing

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about journalism and publishing.

Law

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about law careers.

Museums and heritage

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about museums and heritage.

Politics and public affairs

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about:

Recruitment and HR
Science and engineering
Start-ups and entrepreneurship

Want to know more? Find out about Enterprise support at York.

Working in research

Want to know more? Read our job sector information about working in research.

Internships, placements, grad schemes and special episodes

We've recorded episodes with York students who have completed internships through York Internships and placements through the Placement Year Programme. We've also talked to graduates working on popular graduate schemes:

Internships

Placement Year

Graduate schemes

Special episodes