Nick Galbreath
Founding Partner at Aviso Ventures
Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNick Galbreath is a founding partner at Aviso Ventures and a seasoned engineering leader with over two decades building high-growth startups and enterprise security products. He co-founded Signal Sciences and served as CTO/COO through its $800M exit, bringing deep practical experience in WAF/RASP and application-layer security. Nick has led engineering organizations at Fastly, Etsy, and several adtech firms, repeatedly rebooting core systems and scaling teams across DevOps, security, and product. His open-source contributions to security-focused projects like certificate-transparency and ModSecurity reflect hands-on backend expertise in TLS, parsing, and injection detection. Author of a cryptography primer and holder of multiple patents, he combines a master's in mathematics with early computational research at Los Alamos and Argonne—an uncommon blend of academic rigor and product-driven engineering. Based in Las Vegas, he now invests in early-stage enterprise and security founders, applying operator instincts honed from founding, scaling, and exiting a security company.
16 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Mathematics, Bachelor of Science - BS Mathematics at University of MinnesotaMaster of Science - MS Mathematics, Master of Science - MS Mathematics at Boston University
Github Skills (34)
web-application-firewall10
sql-parser10
python10
testing10
c1110
c1710
go10
parsing10
asn110
cryptography10
data-processing10
text-processing10
waf9
csv-parser9
regular-expression9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
client9/misspell
Dec 2015 - Mar 2018
Correct commonly misspelled English words in source files
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 495 commits, 24 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nick's primary contribution involves enhancing the functionality of the misspell tool. They added new rules for correcting common typos, including contractions and multi-word phrases, by modifying the core rule set and updating the code that generates the rule list. Furthermore, the user improved the tool's efficiency and code quality by refactoring parts of the codebase to remove redundant code and improve template handling. The user also addressed and fixed several false positives.
correcthunspellcommonlyenglish-wordsthai
client9/libinjection
Dec 2013 - Mar 2018
SQL / SQLI tokenizer parser analyzer
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:390 commits, 14 PRs, 149 pushes in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Nick contributed to the integration of mruby, a lightweight scripting language, into the SQL/SQLi tokenizer parser analyzer. They added testing infrastructure for mruby, including build configurations for different compilers (gcc and clang) and static analysis checks. Furthermore, they implemented command-line testing tools for the HTML5 parser and made improvements to the XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) detection capabilities of the library.
pythonsqlsqlitokenizer-parserparser
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.