About Sheran Gunasekera
I am the co-founder of Madison Technologies. I’ve written and published two books on Cybersecurity, having collected over 20 years of software development experience working with brands and companies in the Middle East and Asia. I’ve built and launched infrastructure across multiple sectors including startups, e-commerce, telcos, banks, oil & gas, real estate, FMCG and many others.
Before I launched Madison, I contributed to making history in Indonesia as the founding CTO of Gojek (now GoTo) tasked with giving what was thought to be thousands of people access to Ojek services. As thousands quickly turned into millions, the teams and I faced challenges from infrastructure requirements that doubled daily, cybersecurity procedures to protect millions of customers and even having to prepare hundreds of thousands of store positions for the launch of GO-FOOD. I was also tasked with building Gojek’s first Cybersecurity team which solved hundreds of issues across customer, driver and merchant platforms.
Before Gojek, I worked at Zalora as the VP of Tech just as the company was entering Indonesia. At Zalora, I had the unenviable task of launching the entire e-commerce ecosystem for the Indonesian market, working together with teams in Indonesia, Germany and China. In the life prior to the startup circus, I had several technical roles in Indonesia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, working with clients such as Etisalat, Shell, and Bank Danamon,
Some of the more memorable moments of mine have been when I was chased by security guards when searching a large Dubai bank’s dumpsters for confidential documents, reverse engineering UAE state sanctioned malware for their Blackberry users and teaching a bank in Abu Dhabi how their fixed deposits can be hacked to pay out 400% returns on the initial deposit. I write more detailed posts on tech and security and many more stories on here.
I am a huge nerd. I love technology and writing code. My current crush is detection engineering and automation. I’ve had a love hate relationship with Cybersecurity, but always come back to it because it is something I know like the back of my hand. When I’m not living the glamorous lifestyle of building unicorns and writing books, I hone my photography skills, follow Formula 1 and find some interesting YouTube channels to watch like bigstackD’s one on melting metal.