Pathful, a leading career readiness platform, connects millions of students across the U.S. with industry professionals through engaging video content and live mentoring. With data from over 4 million students and 40,000 volunteers to protect, security isn’t just a technical concern, it’s a responsibility. We spoke with Paul Johansen (Chief Product & Technology Officer) and Matthew Alverson (VP of Engineering) about how Aikido helped their teams cut through the noise, remediate faster, and simplify compliance efforts without disrupting developer workflows.

Gentlemen! Can you briefly introduce Pathful and your roles within the company?

Paul Johansen: I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer. I lead three teams: product operations, product management & marketing, and engineering. We’re all focused on creating and delivering our core product: high-quality, career-focused content that connects students with real-world professionals.

Matthew Alverson: I’m the VP of Engineering, responsible for everything from developers to DevOps to data. My challenge is that not everyone on the team is security-minded, so it’s important that security tools are easy to use and build the right habits.

What makes Pathful unique in the career readiness space?

Paul: Our mission is all about empowering students to discover meaningful career paths, whether that’s becoming a surgeon or a welder. Two things set us apart:

1. Live connections: We have 40,000 professionals who volunteer to speak with students about their jobs.
   
   
2. High-quality content: We produce engaging, short-form videos filmed with real people, in real workplaces, to bring these careers to life.
   We’re active in all 50 states, and we take our responsibility to protect student data extremely seriously.

Where does security fit into your product strategy?

Paul: It’s fundamental. As a SaaS platform in education, we’re responsible for protecting incredibly sensitive data. A security breach in this sector would be as damaging as one in healthcare. So for us, security means reliability, trust, and protecting the future of the company and our students.

Was there a particular incident that made you rethink security?

Paul: No specific breach or incident. It’s more that Pathful came together from two startups, each with different approaches to security. Over time, it became clear to us that security needed to be a core pillar of our strategy, not an afterthought. It’s something both Matthew and I believe in deeply.

What challenges were you facing before using Aikido?

Paul: Honestly, just a lot of noise. We were running pentests and using other security tools, but it was overwhelming and hard to make sense of it all. We knew there were issues, but figuring out where to start, and what actually mattered, was the real problem.

Matthew: It was also tough for the team. The tooling didn’t integrate well into workflows, and the interfaces weren’t intuitive. We were constantly chasing down dependencies and trying to understand the impact of upgrades. It wasn’t scalable.

“There was so much noise that it was hard to create focus. We were constantly sifting through the chaos.” – Paul Johansen

What made Aikido stand out?

Matthew: Aikido does a few things exceptionally well:

• It shows how a vulnerability entered our codebase, which saves us hours of detective work.
• The AI-powered changelog summaries are fantastic. We used to spend hours reading them, now Aikido just tells us whether an upgrade is safe.
• Most importantly, it helps us prioritize. We’re not being spammed with alerts for things we can’t fix.

“The AI changelog analysis saves us hours. Now we can trust, skim, and verify instead of digging endlessly.”

Did you evaluate other tools?

Paul: Not really. Aikido was recommended as part of our group’s compliance requirements, and once we tried it, we realized it was a clear upgrade. We didn’t need a lengthy evaluation, it just worked better.

How was the onboarding process?

Matthew: Incredibly smooth. I didn’t even have to do it, our DevOps person handled it and kept messaging us about how cool the tool was. Aikido fits right into our lower environments, so we can catch issues before they hit production.

“One of the first projects we onboarded to the platform was handled by our team of interns. They quickly grasped the system and were very proud that they had remediated all issues after just the second scan. It really highlights how easy Aikido is to use.”

Has Aikido helped with compliance and reporting?

Paul: Definitely. A lot of our compliance frameworks require us to demonstrate strong security practices. With Aikido, we can check every box: DAST, continuous scanning, vulnerability management. It makes those attestation processes a lot simpler.

Matthew: The trend-over-time reports are something I look at regularly. They help me understand how our risk profile is changing, and whether the team is keeping up with their remediation responsibilities.

 “I actually read the reports now. They help me track trends and hold the team accountable week to week.”

Have you seen any measurable improvements since adopting Aikido?

Matthew: Yes, especially in remediation speed. I’m not tracking it in a dashboard, but I feel it. And if I look at our numbers, we’ve seen a 60% reduction in total issues over the past two weeks. That’s a big deal.

What’s it like working with the Aikido team?

Paul: That’s the best part, we haven’t needed them much. Everything just worked. We had a few setup questions and they were answered immediately. The tool is reliable, and that speaks volumes.

If you had to sum up Aikido’s impact in one sentence?

Paul: Heightened security awareness and more efficient resolution of issues.

Matthew: It really makes vulnerability remediation easier. That’s the core of it.