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How KnowBe4 Built a Cybersecurity Workplace Culture That Scales to 70,000 Customers

Quick Answer

  • What made KnowBe4 a Most Loved Workplace®? KnowBe4 built transparency into the operating system of the company, not into the culture deck, and the proof shows up in the business results: a $4.6 billion valuation, 70,000+ customers, and a workforce that functions as a competitive advantage at every level.

      • • KnowBe4 operates a daily company-wide email briefing in which the CEO shares what is actually happening inside the business, from wins to problems to decisions in flight.
          • • A No Door Policy replaces the open door standard: every leader is expected to proactively reach out to their team, not wait for people to come to them.
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              • • Random CEO lunches connect Bryan Palma directly with employees outside the org chart, with no agenda and no filtering by title or function.
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                  • • The leadership transition from Stu Sjouwerman, now Executive Chairman, to Bryan Palma as President and CEO did not disrupt these systems. The mechanisms kept running because they were built into the organizational structure, not dependent on one person.
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    • • Most Loved Workplace® certification, grounded in the Love of Workplace Index methodology developed by Best Practice Institute, confirmed what was already structurally present.
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      Bottom line: Transparency at KnowBe4 is not a value statement. It is a daily operating habit, running at every level of the organization, and it is a measurable competitive advantage.

$4.6 Billion. 70,000+ Customers. The Real Explanation Is Not the Product.

KnowBe4 is the world’s largest security awareness training platform. It serves more than 70,000 organizations globally. It reached a $4.6 billion valuation when Vista Equity Partners took it private in 2023. By any standard in the technology sector, those are extraordinary numbers.

The easy explanation is product-market fit. Cybersecurity awareness is a genuine enterprise need, demand is accelerating, and KnowBe4 got there early with a platform that works. That explanation is accurate and incomplete.

The harder explanation is culture infrastructure. The kind that keeps people building the same product for years instead of cycling through the door. The kind that means the people answering customer calls in year six know more than the people who answered them in year two. The kind that turns an internal operating norm into an external competitive advantage.

Most companies in cybersecurity compete on feature velocity and pricing. KnowBe4 competed on those too. But they also built something that does not appear on a product roadmap: a transparency culture that functions as an operating system, running every day whether the CEO is in the building or not.

Most people credit KnowBe4’s growth to its product category leadership and first-mover advantage in security awareness training. That is only part of the story. The organizational infrastructure behind the product, specifically the transparency systems that keep 7,000+ employees informed, heard, and aligned, is the mechanism that made the product advantage durable.

The Transparency Systems That Run the Company

Three specific mechanisms define how KnowBe4 has operationalized transparency. Each one is a recurring, documented, leadership-owned practice. Together they address the same organizational problem from three different angles: the gap between what leadership knows and what employees know.

The Daily Company-Wide Briefing

Every day, KnowBe4’s leadership sends a company-wide email that tells employees what is actually happening inside the business. Not a summary of the good news. Not a polished internal communications piece. A real-time account of where the company is, what decisions are being made, and what problems are in progress.

The mechanism works because it is daily, not quarterly. Most organizations brief employees on the state of the business during all-hands meetings scheduled once or twice a year. By the time the briefing arrives, the information is retrospective. The daily cadence at KnowBe4 means employees are informed in real time, not after the fact. They understand the context for decisions before the decisions show up in their work.

That has a specific business consequence. Employees who understand why the company is moving in a direction can align their own work to it without waiting to be directed. Information that would otherwise require management translation gets absorbed directly, eliminating the lag between strategic decision and operational response.

The No Door Policy

KnowBe4 replaces the open door standard with a No Door Policy. The distinction is structural. An open door policy means employees can come to leadership with concerns. A No Door Policy means leaders are expected to go to employees, proactively, before issues accumulate into problems.

This inverts the default flow of information in most organizations. When the burden of communication falls on the employee, information travels upward only when the employee decides it is worth the social risk of raising it. When the burden falls on the leader, information travels upward because the leader is actively seeking it, regardless of whether the employee has decided to volunteer it.

The psychological safety implication is direct. Employees do not need to calculate whether speaking up will be received well. The expectation of proactive outreach from leadership removes that calculation from the equation. What gets surfaced is broader and earlier than what would surface through a traditional open door model.

Random CEO Lunches

Bryan Palma, President and CEO of KnowBe4, holds regular lunches with randomly selected employees. No agenda. No filtering by function, level, or tenure. The randomness is the mechanism: it means every employee has a realistic probability of direct access to the CEO, and it means the CEO receives an unfiltered sample of what the organization is actually experiencing.

This is the same structural logic as the No Door Policy, applied at the executive level. Most organizations filter upward communication through management layers. By the time a concern or an insight reaches the C-suite, it has been interpreted, summarized, and often softened by each layer it passed through. Random CEO lunches remove those layers for the duration of the lunch.

The SPARK framework, developed by Best Practice Institute through its Love of Workplace Index research, identifies Respect as one of five dimensions that distinguish Most Loved Workplaces® from comparison organizations. The Respect dimension measures whether employees experience genuine autonomy, psychological safety, and direct access to leadership. The No Door Policy and the CEO lunches are both structural implementations of what high Respect scores require: leadership that reaches down and creates access, not just accepts requests for it.

Why Transparency Systems Produce Business Outcomes, Not Just Culture Scores

There is a version of this story that treats the daily briefing, the No Door Policy, and the CEO lunches as culture initiatives, as things a company does because they make employees feel good. That framing misses what these systems actually produce.

When employees are briefed daily on the state of the business, they make better decisions at the individual level. They understand the priorities behind their work, which means they can triage competing demands without escalating every ambiguous situation to a manager. That reduces management overhead. It speeds execution. It makes the organization more responsive to conditions that change faster than any planning cycle can anticipate.

When leaders are expected to seek out employee perspectives rather than wait for employees to raise them, the organization surfaces problems earlier. Problems caught early are cheaper to fix. Problems that accumulate until an employee finally decides to raise them have usually grown in scope and cost by the time they reach leadership attention.

When the CEO holds regular direct conversations with randomly selected employees, the executive decision-making process is informed by inputs that would not otherwise reach the C-suite. Product feedback that never made it through the product management funnel. Customer concerns that were handled at the rep level but never escalated. Process friction that everyone in a particular function knows about but nobody has formally documented.

This is what the Most Loved Workplace® methodology is designed to identify and verify: not cultural aspiration, but emotional connectedness that is structurally reinforced and organizationally consistent. KnowBe4’s transparency systems produce the conditions for emotional connectedness not as a byproduct but as their direct and measurable output.

Based on Best Practice Institute research, validated across 1,800+ companies, organizations that build loved cultures see 48% lower turnover and consistently out-innovate their competitors. In a sector where product development depends on institutional knowledge and customer relationships depend on continuity, those two outcomes are not peripheral benefits. They are strategic assets. See more from Best Practice Institute.

What the Leadership Transition Reveals About Infrastructure That Holds

On May 5, 2025, Bryan Palma became President and CEO of KnowBe4. Stu Sjouwerman, who founded the company and led it through its growth to a $4.6 billion valuation, moved to the role of Executive Chairman. In most organizations, a leadership transition at this level produces at least a temporary disruption in the cultural operating system. The habits and norms that a founder built are often personal to them in ways that do not automatically transfer.

At KnowBe4, the daily briefings continued. The No Door Policy remained the expected standard. The CEO lunches kept running under new leadership. That continuity is the evidence.

When a cultural practice depends on the personal presence and commitment of a specific leader, it is a leadership trait. When it continues through a leadership change, it is organizational infrastructure. The distinction matters for anyone evaluating whether KnowBe4’s culture is a product of its founder’s personality or a feature of its management architecture.

The architecture held. Palma said it plainly, “I am humbled to join the company at such an important moment and accelerate the leadership position established by Stu and the team.” That means the transparency systems were built into how KnowBe4 manages, not into who manages it. It also means that as the company continues to scale, the systems that produced its culture outcomes are designed to scale with it. They do not depend on any individual maintaining them. They depend on the organization holding leaders accountable for executing them.

This is the version of culture that scales that the Most Loved Workplace® certification is designed to identify and confirm. Not the version that exists because one person cares deeply and works hard to maintain it, but the version that exists because the organization has made it structural, accountable, and transferable.

The Certification Arc

KnowBe4 did not earn Most Loved Workplace® certification because they ran a certification campaign. They earned it because they built the infrastructure first, and the certification confirmed what was already structurally present.

Most Loved Workplace® certified with the leadership of Bryan Palma, President and CEO, and Taylor Morozovich, Talent Brand Manager — and to every employee who showed up honestly in the assessment process. This is what it looks like when transparency stops being a cultural value and becomes a competitive operating system.

If your organization is doing this work and has not yet made it externally visible, the next step is to get certified.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does cybersecurity workplace culture actually mean, and why does it produce better security outcomes?

In cybersecurity companies, culture is not just a talent advantage. It is a product quality variable. Security awareness training requires instructional accuracy, empathy for the end user, and responsiveness to the evolving threat landscape. All of those depend on employees who are genuinely invested in the work. Organizations where employees feel informed, heard, and trusted produce better products over time because they retain the people who build institutional knowledge about what actually works. KnowBe4's transparency systems are not separate from its product quality. They are part of the same operating logic.

How is a No Door Policy structurally different from an open door policy, and why does that difference matter?

An open door policy places the burden of communication on the employee. The employee must decide that a concern is worth raising, calculate the social risk, and initiate the conversation. A No Door Policy places the burden on the leader, who is expected to reach out proactively. This inverts the information flow: instead of receiving what employees choose to surface, leadership actively seeks what employees know. The practical consequence is that problems surface earlier, when they are smaller and cheaper to address. The cultural consequence is that employees experience a different kind of psychological safety: not just permission to speak, but expectation of being sought out.

Why does the frequency of the daily briefing matter more than its content?

Most internal communications fail because they operate on a schedule that is more convenient for the communicator than useful for the audience. Quarterly all-hands meetings deliver information that was relevant three months ago. The daily cadence at KnowBe4 means employees are informed in real time about conditions that affect their work right now. That changes how decisions get made at every level of the organization. Employees can align their priorities to current conditions without waiting for a scheduled briefing to tell them what has changed. The content matters, but the cadence is what makes the content actionable.

What does a leadership transition tell you about whether a culture is infrastructure or personality?

The most reliable test of whether a cultural practice is organizational infrastructure is whether it survives a change in the leader who built it. Practices that depend on a specific person's energy, presence, or personal commitment are leadership traits. They are valuable while that person is in the role and fragile when they leave. Practices that continue through a leadership transition because they are built into management expectations and accountability structures are infrastructure. The continuation of KnowBe4's transparency systems through the transition from founder leadership to a new CEO is the evidence that these practices are infrastructure, not personality.

How does Most Loved Workplace® certification verify culture in a way that internal surveys cannot?

Internal surveys measure employee sentiment at a point in time. Most Loved Workplace® certification, grounded in the Love of Workplace Index methodology developed by Best Practice Institute, verifies the structural conditions that produce that sentiment: whether emotional connectedness is reinforced by operating habits, leadership behaviors, and organizational systems that are consistent and accountable. Certification makes that verification externally visible to candidates, clients, and partners who cannot evaluate internal surveys. For organizations ready to make their culture infrastructure visible, the first step is certification.

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