Daniel Wilbricht was about one year old when the FBI established the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in 1972. Fast forward a couple of years, and the colorblind kid who’d already crossed astronaut off his list decided he’d find another way to chase the worst kind of people, by learning how they thought.
He never quite made it to Quantico, but he did get a degree in psychology from Virginia Tech.
“I met my wife, fell in love and realized I couldn’t do that job,” Wilbricht says. “It would’ve consumed me.”
Then there was the matter of money. He’d made it to a graduate program at NC State, working part-time while at a psychiatric hospital in Raleigh, when the math stopped adding up. Four years of undergrad down, five more ahead of him.
“I wanted to make money,” he says. “It wasn’t going to be as a psychologist because you just don’t make that kind of money.”
So he took the business track instead, moving through startups and giants — Red Hat, Dell, LogRhythm, Ivanti, Devo — before landing in his current role at Optiv + ClearShark. His interest in the human psyche stayed.
“We’re not all ‘Mr. Robot,’” he says, referring to the USA Network drama about a reclusive hacker in a hoodie who takes down a global corporation from a dimly lit apartment. “Our adversaries aren’t, either. They’re not sitting in dark rooms with hoodies.”
What his psychology degree taught him, he says, was more useful than any technical credential: “You need to understand the person sitting at the keyboard. That helps you find that attacker more rapidly.”
The Kid Who Wanted Quantico
Wilbricht comes from a family of six kids, right in the middle, with a father in Navy intelligence and a childhood spent moving between bases. He arrived at Virginia Tech as a finance major, drawn to engineering classes on the side — chemistry, complex math — while the required business courses left him cold.
“They had 500-plus people in them,” he says. “They were fine, but a little boring.”
The smaller classes pulled Wilbricht in a different direction: philosophy, psychology and English. Virginia Tech had a strong research program, and he got involved early, doing undergraduate studies in psychology that hooked him on the field. Serial killers and profiling criminals fascinated him most.
“For some reason, I thought I’d be really good at that,” he says. “It was either this or working for the CIA.”
Wilbricht graduated, started a Ph.D. program and kept working. Then he stopped. The timeline didn’t add up, and he had a clearer sense of what he wanted. What came next was figuring out how to get there, through small companies, large ones, whatever offered the right problem to solve. Strategy has been the constant.
“I’m really good at looking at things from different angles,” he says. “I can walk into a room, identify what’s not right and help try to make it right.”
Today, that focus is his day job. Since joining Optiv + ClearShark in November 2023 as president, Wilbricht has focused on unifying four acquired companies into a single federal cybersecurity and IT solutions provider, building out a managed services practice he sees as the path to $1 billion in revenue. The company delivers cybersecurity strategy, technology and managed services to over 7,500 federal customers across defense, intelligence and civilian agencies.
The psychology degree followed him here. Cybersecurity, he says, is humans trying to outsmart each other — the technology is just the chessboard, as he puts it. Knowing how attackers think matters more than knowing the tools they use, and the same logic applies inside the organization: spotting burnout and building a culture that keeps people engaged.
“I would say my skills across the board come down to human behavior,” Wilbricht says. “Especially in a role like mine, where culture is king.”
Four Companies, One Jersey
When Wilbricht joined after the acquisitions, his first priority was culture. Four companies had just been pulled into one. He’d been through enough of these to know how badly they could go sideways.
“One plus one doesn’t always equal two,” he says. “You’ve got to be more flexible. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up with something blowing up in your face.”
Wilbricht had seen it before at Dell, brought in to help merge a string of software acquisitions into a single organization. Getting the culture right had to come before anything else.
“It was making sure that ClearShark, ClearShark Services, FedBiz IT, Optiv Federal — everyone was wearing the same jersey,” he says. “But it also had to match Optiv’s. We’re our own company, our own entity, but we still wanted the mission, the messaging, the core values to align.”
It was a fine line: Move too fast and you lose what made the smaller companies worth acquiring in the first place.
For Wilbricht, culture comes down to one thing: people. Technology changes fast, but engineers who care, account managers who believe in the mission and even the person in accounting who feels like part of the team, that’s what gets a company somewhere others can’t.
“We don’t always have to agree, but when we walk out that door, we need to represent whatever we’ve decided on as a group,” he says.
Nobody’s in a Hoodie
Wilbricht has a few misconceptions he keeps encountering. The first is the “Mr. Robot” image — the idea that cybersecurity is dark rooms and hoodies, on either side of the fight. The second is that AI is a monolith. Ask three people if they’re using it and you’ll get three completely different answers, he says, from basic search to autonomous agents.
“Right now, I would call it almost the world’s best intern,” he says.
The third is what a Value-Added Reseller actually does. Optiv + ClearShark tests thousands of tools, advises on what to implement and recommends solutions based on the mission and not the vendor.
“Our value is in the V,” he says. “We’re not just moving boxes.”
At work, Wilbricht’s AI use is constrained by CMMC 2.0 certification and the company is still building out its internal data sets. Personally, he’s a regular user, mostly for workouts. He puts in his goals, his constraints and asks the same question three times to see where the answers converge.
He also advises Govly, a public sector procurement platform that uses AI to help government contractors spot opportunities and auto-generate RFPs, though he admits he hasn’t fed it his own data yet.
The Profile He Never Stopped Running
Ask Wilbricht what he’d be doing if he weren’t in cybersecurity and he has two answers. One ties it all back to the beginning.
After 9/11, he was at a startup collecting and making sense of intelligence data, parsing coded language, figuring out what people actually meant when they said they were baking bread. He never quite lost the thread.
“Profiling is innate,” he says. “It’s a skill set I’ve enjoyed no matter what the job was.”
The other answer has nothing to do with any of it: cooking — smoking meat, brewing beer, experimenting with sous vide.
“I just start throwing stuff together until it tastes good,” Wilbricht says. His wife handles the baking. The precise measuring, the rule-following — that part, he says, is all hers.
It’s a telling detail from someone who spent his career reading people, spotting patterns and making judgment calls no training could have prepared him for.
Some things you learn — and some things you just know.