Proof Welcomes John Heasman as Chief Information Security Officer

Earlier this summer, Proof welcomed John Heasman as its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). A 22-year veteran of information security, John will oversee Proof’s information security program and serve Proof's clients as the voice of the customer on security.

John's experience is deeply valuable in a world of deepfakes, widespread fraud, and other fundamental challenges to the security of identities and other sensitive information. He brings a broad and deep background in how companies think about and organize themselves around technology in the face of continual change and innovation by threat actors.

Earlier in his career, John spent five years as Deputy CISO at DocuSign, where he worked with Eric Fleischman (Proof Chief Technical Officer), Darren Louie (Proof VP of Product) and Bradley Carrion (Proof Software Engineer). When Eric approached John about coming to Proof at CISO, it was an easy choice for him. John was drawn to Proof’s clear mission and feels confident about how the company is positioned to address the challenges ahead. Not to mention, he was also happy to rejoin his former colleagues. 

Most recently, John served five years as CISO at Chegg, a student-first connected learning platform. He's excited to return to a B2B organization and looks forward to working with enterprise customers with exacting security standards and helping Proof scale the processes already in place to secure customer data. 

Since starting at Proof, John has been impressed by how intentionally everything has been designed, and he is pleasantly surprised by how much documentation Proof produces about the decisions it makes. “People are willing to document everything,” he says, noting that coming into a company and understanding why things are the way they are can often feel like an archaeological dig to unearth the past. The documentation that the Proof team has written, across all parts of the company, has been very helpful in helping him ramp up.

John grew up in England, but now calls Knoxville, TN home. He's happily assimilated into the South, which means these days, he follows a different type of football (the Southeastern Conference and the University of Tennessee Volunteers) but still makes time to catch up on English soccer. He also enjoys trail running throughout Great Smoky Mountains National Park.