Tracey Nyholt is the Founder of TechJutsu and a specialist in Identity & Access Management. She leads a team on a mission to solve the challenge of caller verification — creating a solution that’s not only more accessible but also more secure. By working closely with call centre architects, TechJutsu streamlines the verification process and helps reduce caller fraud.
Tracey launched and grew TechJutsu with the support of the Cyber Accelerator Program, one of the Catalyst’s inaugural initiatives for emerging cyber startups.
Celebrating the small wins
Picture this: a sunny Saturday in Calgary. A boys’ soccer team is mid-game on a local pitch. The boys, about twelve years old, are a blur of motion — charging up and down the field with abandon. Each time they score, they tear around the field like they’ve just won the World Cup. And maybe to the average eye, it’s a regular Saturday scene, but to Tracey Nyholt — Founder and CEO of TechJutsu — it planted the seed for a new way of being.
They were onto something, she says. After witnessing her nephews on the soccer field near her home in Calgary, she decided to celebrate the small wins in her day, too. “I stole it from the boys,” Tracey laughs. Each time she did something small and challenging in her day, like sending an email she had been avoiding, she would celebrate with exuberant, positive self-talk. “It gave me a huge confidence boost — just from acting like one of the boys,” Tracey says. “And I’ve carried that through.”
On the reality of women in tech
In the early days of her career, Tracey found herself grasping for confidence. “I once lost a job interview because someone said I didn’t look smart enough,” Tracey recalls. “So I dyed my hair brown and wore fake glasses.” It was a male dominant field and in the beginning, Tracey often felt blocked or pushed out. “I think those early rejections, if you don’t find a way to overcome them, will become really difficult,” she says. On the other side of those rejections, Tracey has learned to recognize and reinforce her own progress. In many ways, she’s become her own best mentor. And that started with the mentality she observed on the soccer field. An award is icing on the cake, but Tracey has built and maintains the foundation. She’s an advocate for positive self-talk, and the continual cultivation of inner strength. Nowadays, she often recommends the field to young female professionals, highlighting flexibility and remote-work options, which make it easier to build both a career and a family.
Finding support at the Catalyst
Tracey reflects that women often feel pressured to be perfect, but business, she says, is messy by nature. At the point in the evolution of TechJutsu when Tracey felt the most alone, she found refuge in the Catalyst. “You’re going to fall flat on your face sometimes, and it feels like you can’t get up again, but you have to.” It was a LinkedIn post promoting the Catalyst Cyber Accelerator program in 2023 that got Tracey’s attention. “I got lucky,” she says. That single moment was transformative, as an entrepreneur.
In the Catalyst Cyber Accelerator program, one of the organization’s first offerings for the cyber startup industry, Tracey collaborated with peers and advisors to solve challenges around cash flow, increase revenue, and plan for HR growth to ensure TechJutsu had a strong talent pipeline. “It was a fantastic experience,” says Tracey. “It was a different kind of challenge than I was used to. It took time to find my footing. The Catalyst really supported me until I was ready to walk by myself. I think it’s just knowing you’re not doing it alone.”
Human-centred cybersecurity
Tracey’s perspective comes from a career of over 30 years in identity and access management. She feels fortunate to have started in a vital sector — and stayed because there was always more to learn. For Tracey, technology is always about people. “Technology serves people,” she says. “If someone impersonates you, they might access your bank account or health records — and that comes with a real human cost.”
The spark behind TechJutsu
TechJutsu took off close to home. Tracey observed how frustrated her aging father would become on a phone call with the bank or CRA. They’d barrage him with questions he couldn’t always answer. It wasn’t just insecure. It was humiliating.
Tracey set out to find a solution that was secure and accessible. “I could probably look up your birthday on social media,” says Tracey. “I can figure out the security questions you’re going to be asked, and so can fraudsters.” Multi-factor authentication — often a simple phone app that confirms your identity — solves that problem.
Working in identity and access management has taught Tracey that education is instrumental. She views it as the role and responsibility of cyber professionals to translate complex concepts into lay terms. Tracey believes rapid tech evolution can make everyday users feel like outsiders — something she actively works to change.
One way she translates cyberspeak is through the analogy of a house. You’ve locked the front door tight but left the back window wide open. For true security, we need to lock the windows and doors.
The power of cyber education
There is no one group exempt from cyber vulnerability. While people often assume that seniors or marginalized groups are most at risk, Tracey argues that cyber vulnerability touches everyone, because your safety depends on how well others protect your data. “If they don’t safeguard it properly,” Tracey warns, “your information could fall into the wrong hands.”
Part of a public education effort is to reinforce that whether you trust a bank or a hospital, your information is vulnerable if they don’t do their job and secure things properly. At the same time, Tracey emphasizes that there’s no place for fear-mongering. She likens it to measles — scary without the vaccine, but manageable when protected. “We know how to protect against many of these attacks,” says Tracey, “and we just have to educate people in organizations to do that work so that we don’t have to be scared.”
Caution in the age of AI
Tracey’s reflections on AI embody her experience as a business leader: “As your business grows, so do your problems.” However, Tracey feels that her confidence has grown, and her ability to handle problems has developed. When asked about the future of cybersecurity, Tracey says she feels certain that AI will change everything — sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. She thinks the biggest risk is companies that are in a hurry to use AI and don’t thoroughly assess the risks and consequences.
She points to a case where companies were encouraged to make corporate data searchable by AI — making it easier to search, but also easier for competitors to access. But what happens when your competitors gain access to that same information? Tracey says, “Too often, it feels like the implications haven’t been fully thought through.”
Tracey hopes that no matter who holds power in government, Canada adopts a dedicated Minister of Cybersecurity — as Australia has. With rising cyber threats and recent tensions in US-Canada data policies, she believes strong federal leadership is essential.
Tracey today: Resilience, recognition, and self-belief
Now, decades into her career, Tracey is finally being recognized, with such honours as the AMER Rising Star Partner of the Year 2024 by Okta. In her career, Tracey has trained herself not to need external validation. When it comes, she says, it feels like it’s 30 years too late. “I don’t think I need it anymore,” says Tracey. “I’ve learned to be my own cheerleader — to generate the encouragement I need from within.”
Tracey’s go-to approach when faced with a problem? Step back and ask: how do I get over this, under it, or around it? That’s where resilience takes root — and where creativity thrives. If she were to give notes to her younger self, she would say, “Don’t listen to any of the external voices that tell you you’re not smart enough, that you’re not meant for this. Just go for it.”
Tracey reflects on the foundation she built at the Catalyst: “The Catalyst Cyber Accelerator program gave me the technical foundation and solution-oriented mindset I needed to get started in cybersecurity. Now, as a founder, I see how valuable other startup programs, like the Catalyst’s Cyber Challenge, or the RBC FinSec Incubator, are. It addresses the real-world security and compliance challenges startups face when trying to break into the financial sector — and that kind of targeted support is rare and essential.”
The road wasn’t always easy. More often than not, the barriers outnumbered the benefits. But for Tracey Nyholt, the steady work of building a cybersecurity career has taken her from Calgary to Germany and Australia with many learnings and much growth in between. And today, she wouldn’t trade it for anything.
