Alexander Craig

Durham University Business School

“Curious computer scientist turned Chief of Staff. Lifelong learner, restless traveler, hooked on hard problems.”

Age: 28

Hometown: Merseyside, UK

Fun fact about yourself: I’m a serial-city-breaker! When my wife and I lived near the airport we set ourselves a challenge: see as much of the world as we could in one and two-day weekend breaks. We hit a 16-month streak and 20 different countries before life finally caught up with us.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Durham University, Integrated MEng Computer Science (1st Class)

Where are you currently working? PortSwigger, Chief of Staff to the CEO

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Building PortSwigger’s Discord community into the active home of 14,000 web security testers. The brief from our CEO was a single sentence: “Do something with community.” I had no playbook, so I learned. I read everything I could find on community design, talked to people running communities I admired, and worked out what good looked like before standing anything up. The harder part was building the internal team to run it, which meant winning buy-in from people I had no authority over and getting them to commit real time to a project with no precedent at the company.

With that team in place, we seeded the community with the right early advocates. It now runs on a mix of member-led and PortSwigger-driven content: peer moderation, webinars, and a full ambassador programme that has spawned its own paid roles. I am most proud of this one because I took it from blank page to clean handover to a new community marketing team. The thing I built outlived my involvement in it, which is the highest bar I know for whether a project actually worked.

Why did you choose this school’s online MBA program? I did my undergraduate degree at Durham, met my wife there, and I know how good the faculty and researchers are. Going back was a straightforward decision. The online format also meant I could stay in the Chief of Staff role at PortSwigger through our first external investment and the work of maturing the business around it, rather than pausing for two years. The other reason was the people. At the open day, what sold me was the president of the college I would be joining, laying out his plans to build a real alumni network for a college that historically hasn’t had much of one. Other open days had felt more focused on unlocking a pay increase than on actual learning. Durham felt like somewhere people went because they wanted to learn alongside other curious people.

What was your favorite part of being in an online MBA program? It was the community, which surprised me. WhatsApp groups formed in the first week, the cohort culture set in immediately, and we ended up debating cases at 9pm on a Tuesday with people in three time zones. The format also gave me cultural and industry range an in-person Durham MBA could never have. I was learning alongside people working in countries and sectors I would otherwise never have been exposed to, and the conversations were richer for it.

How did your online MBA experience compare with your in-the-classroom experience as an undergraduate student? As an undergraduate, the lecturer was the source of the material. Even when there was good discussion, we were mostly working from textbooks and theory rather than first-hand experience. The MBA flips that. Everyone in the room has real-world experience to bring, and the teaching is built to draw it out rather than transmit information one way. The technology has also improved. Every lecture being recorded meant I could go back and rewatch the tricky bits on my own time, which was a far friendlier format than the scribbled-notes approach I had at 20.

What is your best piece of advice to an applicant for thriving in an online MBA program? Put the work in, and be honest with yourself about why you are doing it. You cannot squeeze an MBA into the gaps in your week or cram it the night before. The course works because of the lectures, the group work, and the discussions. If you are not planning to be available for those, the value evaporates. Pick the programme deliberately, then show up for it deliberately. That is most of it.

How has your online MBA education helped you in your current job? In more ways than I expected. As a young professional working with our PE investors, minuting board meetings, and leading a million-dollar consultancy project, it is very easy to be quietly underestimated or talked over. The MBA gave me the vocabulary and frameworks to make my competence visible faster. The bigger impact has been timing. Doing the MBA online meant I could apply each module to PortSwigger at the same time I was studying it. The performance review system I implemented drew straight from the Leading and Managing People module. The strategy work I was running drew directly from Strategic Management. That tightness between learning and doing is the single biggest reason I would recommend an online MBA over the alternatives.

Did you earn a promotion while in the program or immediately after graduation? PortSwigger does not have strict career ladders, but my scope and salary have grown materially across the programme. I now co-lead the communication of our company strategy, run the workshops that help shape it, and own projects I would have hesitated to put my hand up for two years ago: managing our relationships with frontier model providers, leading our internal AI transformation project, and stepping in as interim head of Product whilst recruiting a VP. The theoretical backing matters less for the ideas themselves than for the confidence to back myself in a room of people who have been doing this for twenty years longer than I have.

Why did you pursue an online MBA program instead of a full-time residential or executive MBA program? Because pressing pause on PortSwigger for two years would have made me worse, not better. Cybersecurity and the pace of AI mean stepping out, even to learn, is a step backwards rather than forwards. Even a two-week holiday is enough for the landscape to shift; I dread to think what two years out would have looked like. Online let me keep practising what I was studying in real time, and the in-person module blocks, open days, and conferences gave me the residential balance without the disruption.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Durham encourages it for learning, in line with the school’s AI policy. There are clear rules per assignment about what you can and can’t use AI for, and what to declare, but the school’s stance is that AI is a tool for learning, not something to hide.

I’ve found it incredibly useful. It works best as a study partner. I’ll explain a concept back to find my own gaps, ask it to argue the other way, have it quiz me to check what’s stuck, or pull in academic material the core course doesn’t cover. To make it more useful for me, I’ve hooked it into my work at PortSwigger so it can surface real examples from my day job when an idea feels too abstract. The other place it has been useful is academic writing. Coming from a STEM degree, where most of my marks came from practical coursework, long essays were new ground. AI is good at flagging clunky sentence construction I’d otherwise miss.

The main thing I’ve learnt is that you get out what you put in. Use it lazily and it becomes a replacement for thinking. Prompt it well and use it intentionally, and it accelerates your learning without becoming a crutch.

Number of Hours Per Week Spent on an Online MBA: Around 15 on average, flexed heavily around holidays and work priorities.

What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? Outsized impact, in whatever shape it takes. In the near term, that means helping bring the tools I believe in at PortSwigger to a much wider market and securing more of the web in the process. Looking further out, the shape I am increasingly drawn to is a portfolio or board career: fractionally supporting a lot of people across a lot of problems, where the variety stays high and the reach gets wider with every new seat. The thing I am firm on is what I will not accept, which is stagnation. I want to keep being challenged, enjoy going to work, and finish each day feeling like I did something that mattered.

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