Nathaniel Fick
Nathaniel Fick was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1977. He graduated with high honors from Dartmouth College in 1999, earning degrees in Classics and Government. While at Dartmouth, Fick captained the cycling team to a US National Championship, and wrote a senior thesis on Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and its implications for American foreign policy.
In 1998, after his junior year at Dartmouth, Fick attended the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidates School and was commissioned a second lieutenant upon graduating college the following year.
Fick led his platoon into Afghanistan only weeks after 9/11, helping to drive the Taliban from its spiritual capital in Kandahar. After returning to the States in 2002, he was invited to join Recon, the Corps' special operations force. Fick led a reconnaissance platoon in combat during the earliest months of Operation Iraqi Freedom, from the battle of Nasiriyah to the fall of Baghdad, and into the perilous peacekeeping that followed.
Fick and his platoon were the subjects of a series of articles in Rolling Stone and the book Generation Kill by the embedded journalist Evan Wright. The articles won the National Magazine Award in 2003. Generation Kill was adapted by David Simon and Ed Burns into a miniseries of the same name for HBO, in which Fick was portrayed by actor Stark Sands
Fick left the Marines as a captain in 2003 After leaving the Marines, Fick used the GI Bill to attend Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School.
Fick became the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at the Center for a New American Security in 2008 and later was appointed CEO in June 2009.
Endgame's endpoint security platform is widely deployed across commercial and government customers. In 2018, Endgame was named one of the "100 Best Cloud Companies in the World" by Forbes, and Nate was recognized by Fast Company Magazine as one of the "Most Creative People in Business."
He comments frequently in the media on technology and national security matters, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
He appears regularly on business television, including CNBC and Bloomberg TV. Fick has testified before the United States Senate on Iraq and spoke at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 28, 2008, the night Barack Obama accepted the presidential nomination.
Fick was elected to Dartmouth College's Board of Trustees in April 2012. He also serves on the Military & Veterans Advisory Council at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
He resides in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Margaret Angell, and two daughters.
“VJ had gone to the Naval Academy, where he competed as a powerlifter and developed a distaste for military customs such as short hair and addressing people by rank.”
“Your job is to be the hardest motherfucker in your platoon," he said while pointing at me across the desk. "Do that, and everything else will fall into place."He added that I was assigned to Bravo Company, call sign Hitman, and wished me luck.”
“Hardness," I was learning, was the supreme virtue among recon Marines. The greatest compliment one could pay to another was to say he was hard. Hardness wasn't toughness, nor was it courage, although both were part of it. Hardness was the ability to face an overwhelming situation with aplomb, smile calmly at it, and then triumph through sheer professional pride.”
“Do nothing but be prepared to do anything.”