Peter Dohm has spent his career working with systems where failure can have serious consequences. He started in telecommunications during the early days of the internet, spent nearly 20 years at Battelle, including serving as CISO, and worked on cybersecurity problems involving nation-state adversaries and major defense systems.

That experience shaped a principle that comes up throughout this conversation: observe everything.

Peter talks with Warner Moore about why visibility becomes so important when you cannot assume every attack can be prevented, how humans can become valuable security sensors, and why some of the most useful signals may come from places security teams rarely look.

He also shares the story of helping leaders rethink the cyber risk around a $20B weapons system by looking at the economics from an attacker’s perspective. Today, as CTO and employee number one at Black Mesa Technology, Peter is applying the same first-principles mindset to biomanufacturing, using AI and LLMs to help smaller manufacturers identify quality issues faster and reduce risk.

The conversation covers nation-state cybersecurity, observability, incident response, attacker economics, first-principles risk management, AI in biomanufacturing, startup product-market fit, and what decades of working with complex systems have taught Peter about managing risk.

🔗 Connect

Peter Dohm: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-j-dohm/

Gamma Force: https://gammaforce.io

Warner Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/warnermoore/

📚 Mentioned in the episode

➡️ The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

➡️ Intelligence Matters podcast