Snyk announced that Peter McKay will be stepping down as CEO.
CEO transitions almost always tell the same story. The board gets restless. The numbers dip. There’s a “mutual decision” that everyone knows wasn’t mutual. The press release lands with carefully chosen words about “pursuing other opportunities” and “exciting new chapters.” It’s corporate theater, and everyone in the industry knows how to read between the lines.
That’s not what’s happening at Snyk.
Peter McKay is not stepping down because something went wrong, but because he believes the company needs a different kind of leader for the next phase. There’s no Kiss-Cam video. He’s not being pushed. The company isn’t struggling. In fact, by most metrics, Snyk is thriving. McKay took over seven years ago when the company was doing about $2 million in revenue. Today, Snyk sits in the mid-hundreds of millions with nearly 4,800 customers, and its platform processes billions of API calls annually.
So why leave?
From Developer Security to AI Security
I sat down with McKay last week to discuss the move, and he was candid about his thinking. The company made an aggressive pivot starting in mid-2024—shifting from its roots as a developer security company to positioning itself as an AI security company. The catalyst was the explosion of code-generating copilots and the new attack surfaces they create. McKay told me the company set up a separate business unit specifically for AI security, staffed with people who didn’t carry the baggage of how things had always been done.
“I quarantined a separate business around AI security and built that up with people who didn’t know this business,” McKay explained. “It’s a completely different mindset. You had to kind of turn everything upside down.”
That bet paid off. Snyk launched its AI Trust Platform, which has driven more than $200 million in total contract value. The company now runs 6.75 billion security tests a year and handles 46 billion API calls. Over 550 customers are actively testing Snyk’s AI security capabilities.
Knowing When to Hand Off the Baton
But here’s where McKay’s decision gets interesting—and, frankly, rare.
He looked at what the company needed next and concluded it wasn’t him. Not because he failed, but because the skills required to scale a SaaS company from $2 million to the mid-hundreds of millions are fundamentally different from the skills needed to lead a product-driven AI security company in 2026 and beyond.
“The winners of this AI era are going to be people who continue to innovate and execute on an AI roadmap,” McKay noted. “It’s a product-led motion today. If you’re entering a new era where the skills are changing for leading the company, you have to recognize that.”
He referenced a principle he keeps coming back to—that leaders should be hungry, humble, and smart. The humble part, he said, means knowing when you might not be the best person for what the company needs next.
“If you really believe in the people in the company, you always do what’s right for them,” he stressed. “You’ve got to put the ego aside.”
That makes sense to me because I have been struggling with a similar theme for the broader concept of AI across technology and productivity. It’s easy to look at new technology and think about how it can help you do what you already do, just faster or better. But the harder question is whether AI fundamentally changes what you should be doing in the first place. And answering that question often requires being able to view the challenge from a fresh perspective that isn’t biased by past or present and can consider the future potential on its own merits.
McKay described it almost the same way. He talked about how the speed of the AI market makes what used to take three months now happen in three days. Four people building something in four days instead of 40 people working for three months. That’s not an incremental shift. It requires a completely different kind of leadership.
No Rush, No Regrets
McKay isn’t rushing out the door. There’s no timeline forcing his hand. He plans to stay as long as the transition requires and will work directly with the board to find the right successor—someone he described as an AI-immersed product and engineering leader. After that, he plans to move into board advisory roles, helping other companies navigate the same SaaS-to-AI pivot he just led.
“We aren’t on any specific clock,” McKay said. “If it takes two months, four months, six months, ten months—I’m fine. I’m not going anywhere. I just want to make sure we get the right person.”
The Question Every CEO Should Ask
There’s a lesson here that extends well beyond Snyk. The tech industry—cybersecurity, especially—is littered with CEOs who stayed too long. Leaders who built something great during one phase and then held on through the next phase out of ego, inertia, or the simple inability to imagine anyone else in the chair. Some of them eventually got pushed out after the damage was done. Some are still there, presiding over companies that lost their edge years ago.
What McKay is doing is quietly radical. He’s leaving from a position of strength, on his own terms, because he assessed what the company needs and decided it’s not what he does best. That takes a kind of self-awareness that is genuinely uncommon among people who have successfully run companies.
Every CEO should be asking the question McKay asked himself: Am I still the right person for the next phase of this company? The honest answer might be uncomfortable. But as McKay’s decision demonstrates, the willingness to act on that answer—rather than just think about it—is what separates leaders who build lasting companies from those who just build resumes.