If joining the inaugural cohort of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business Part-Time MBA program in 2022 wasn’t enough of a leap of faith, Joseph Coulombre (PTMBA ’25) was ready to take another.
Shortly after he began his studies, Coulombre left his job to found Pathfinder Security Advisors, a software and cybersecurity solutions developer serving the national security and defense community.
Security and defense, Coulombre knew well. He had served in the U.S. Army as a human intelligence collector and Arabic linguist. A certified information systems security professional, he supported the defense and intelligence communities while working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and The MITRE Corporation.
Entrepreneurship, however, was new. As new to him as the Part-Time MBA program was to Darden.
As it turned out, the dual leaps of faith each added value to the other. In this Q&A, Coulombre shares his founder’s journey and how Darden’s Part-Time MBA served his vision for the next big step in his career.
How did you manage to balance founding Pathfinder with the rigor of the Part-Time MBA program?
It was definitely a lot, but my circumstances at the time helped make it possible. Once I left my job to start Pathfinder, I had much more control over my day-to-day schedule. The tradeoff was that work quickly filled what used to be considered “free time.” In a strange way, the program actually gave my weeks some much-needed structure.
I think most entrepreneurs early on end up working all hours of the day because there’s just so much to get done. Having cases to prepare and classes to attend gave me fixed commitments to work around, which forced me to be much more disciplined with my time.
I was also building the company while surrounded by brilliant people with experience in areas I was just encountering for the first time. My cohort had lawyers, CPAs, consultants and professionals from a wide range of fields, so when I ran into something I didn’t fully understand, there was usually someone I could speak with who could help point me in the right direction.
I’d like to say a sincere thank you to my entire cohort and the Darden faculty. Starting a company while finishing an MBA was a lot of work, and there are a lot of people who helped me along the way.
What’s your vision for Pathfinder as it grows into the future?
In cybersecurity, threats are evolving quickly, especially with the rapid growth of AI. At the same time, many of the systems used across our national security enterprise have been much slower to modernize—and for good reason. The industry has always been cautious about introducing new capabilities because every change can create new risk. But that same caution leaves many processes unnecessarily inefficient.
Our vision at Pathfinder has always been to bridge that gap, so improving security doesn’t come at the expense of efficiency. To that end, we’ve spent the past two years building a secure architecture that lets us rapidly develop solutions for a range of use cases without starting from scratch each time. Right now, we’re finalizing the first product built on it, which solves a high-stakes challenge facing the national security community.
Have you been following a career plan or discovering your passion and purpose along the journey?
To be perfectly honest, I never really had a plan. I’ve mostly followed whatever I found interesting and always looked for opportunities to learn more, whether that meant going back to school or changing jobs. After the Army, I moved into a role that exposed me to the R&D side of the defense industry. I’ve always been a bit of a nerd, so getting to work alongside and learn from incredibly smart people really piqued my interest.
At the same time, my experiences in the military and later in industry made me increasingly frustrated by how inefficient a lot of mission-critical processes were. Sometimes there was a very good reason. But just as often, there wasn’t, and those were the situations that really stuck with me. Over the years, and especially after learning more about the business side of things at Darden, I finally got to a point where I wanted to see if I could solve some of those problems myself.
You learned Arabic while in the Army and became an Arabic linguist. How did learning another language impact your professional journey?
!نعم، فعلت (Translation: Yes, I did!)
My experience learning Arabic was a major influence on my interest in secure system design. As I started getting into cybersecurity, I found myself drawing a lot of parallels between learning the Arabic alphabet and computer code. Both rely on syntax, patterns and rules, and I think having already learned to process information that way helped make the coding aspects click for me.
Learning Arabic also gave me a much more personal understanding of the people and cultures we were studying. All of my instructors at the Defense Language Institute were native-born speakers, many of whom had grown up in countries the U.S. was actively in conflict with. Getting to know them, hearing their stories and learning directly from people who had lived those experiences gave me a perspective I probably never would have otherwise had. Most importantly, I think it helped me separate the people themselves from the conflicts and gave me a much more nuanced and human understanding of the region.
What’s your advice for leaders facing cybersecurity challenges and AI disruption?
More business leaders need to be thinking about the fact that AI isn’t just going to change which tools an organization uses. It’s going to challenge the institutional processes that organizations rely on to make critical decisions and implement change.
AI doesn’t just make attacks more capable; it changes how quickly and cheaply they can happen. Meanwhile, the organizations defending against them still rely on policies, approval chains and layers of review that were built for a much slower operating tempo. When one side is moving at machine speed and the other at human speed, eventually those processes become a vulnerability. Business leaders are going to have to decide which processes are truly protecting them, and which are preventing them from keeping up.
Why did you choose to pursue an MBA, and why was the Darden Part-Time MBA the one for you?
My background had always been specialized, and the further I got in my career, the more I realized there was a lot I didn’t understand about how organizations operate. I wanted to broaden my understanding in areas I hadn’t been exposed to before, and an MBA felt like the logical next step. I also didn’t want to pause my professional career for two years, so from the beginning, I was really only considering a part-time format.
When I found out Darden had a program in Northern Virginia, I got the chance to talk with the admissions team and some current students. After those conversations, I was pretty sold and didn’t want to go anywhere else. I just had to decide between applying to the brand-new Part-Time MBA or the Executive MBA program. Around that same time, I had also just finished my time with the National Guard. After years of having one weekend every month spoken for, I was pretty happy to have that time back and wasn’t eager to immediately give it up again for the EMBA program. So when it came down to the two programs, the Part-Time MBA was the better format for me.
Do any experiences stand out from your time in the Part-Time MBA program?
An experience that still stands out to me happened in the very first week of the program, when we went to Charlottesville for Residency 1. To be perfectly honest, I spent a good part of the drive second-guessing my decision. I had just finished another graduate program while working full time, and I was seriously questioning whether I really wanted to sign myself up for another two and a half years of that.
I had no idea what to expect. My previous program had been largely online because of COVID, so I couldn’t imagine what Darden could possibly have planned for us for an entire week. But from the first day at Saunders Hall, I started to understand what made the program different. I was more engaged academically than I had ever been because it felt like we were working through real business problems together, rather than just sitting there being taught at.
I showed up not knowing a single person, and by the end of the week, it felt like I had known my learning team for years. I went from wondering why I was there to being genuinely disappointed when the week was over.
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