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Fortifying Your Networks: This Volleyball-loving 6’5 Entrepreneur Runs a $13 Billion Dollar Business

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We all rely on the Internet for most of our things. Everything from our family photos to important work details is on the Internet. Therefore, we need to be sure that they are in safe hands. So, how do we make sure that our data is safe? Well, Cybersecurity software helps us with this by using a combination of measures such as firewalls, privacy protection, and anti-virus software. Thanks to high-profile data breaches, malicious hacks, and extortion scams, maintaining good Cyber-measures has become a priority for companies. This time, we will be taking a look at one of the most prominent Cybersecurity firms in the world. Here’s how Fortinet founder Ken Xie helps to make the world wide web a safer, better place!

About the Founders

Ken Xie did his electrical engineering from Stanford and started his first Cyber-security firm named SIS while in college. One of his early ventures was bought by Juniper for $4 billion, and two decades later, his company is worth $13 billion, exceeding that of Juniper! Meanwhile, Michael Xie, who serves as the firm’s president and CTO, did his electrical engineering from the University of Manitoba. Ken is also a gifted athlete, who wanted to be a professional volleyball player while growing up. He stands tall at six feet and five inches, but his parents who worked at the Tsinghua University in China didn’t agree with his career plan. Instead, they got him interested in engineering and Xie’s life transformed.

A Family Initiative

Brothers Michael and Ken Xie founded Fortinet in 2000, by launching their first firewall Fortigate. They then added new features such as wireless access points, messaging options and sandboxing in later years. Within three years, the company raised more than $90 million in funding. Fortinet went public in 2009, after raising over $156 million through its IPO. Fortinet released its Security Fabric system in 2016, and since then, the product has added several new features such as IoT and WAN.

Earlier Efforts

Before starting Fortinet, Ken Xie founded NetScreen, while Michael Xie was as an executive at ServeGate. The duo built Appligation Inc in 2000, later renamed to ApSecure the same year, which finally became Fortinet. The pair got the idea to name their company Fortnite through the phrase Fortified Networks. While trying to raise funds for Fortinet, Ken’s earlier effort, NetScreen got acquired by Juniper Networks for around $4 billion.

Early Years

Their first product came out only two years later, after stringent research and development. Between the years of 2000 and 2003, the company was able to raise over $13 million through private funding. By August of 2003, they brought in another $30 million, while they added an additional $50 million in 2004. In 2003, they launched their first channel program and began distribution in Canada the same year, via Westcon Canada. They expanded to the UK through Norwood Adam in 2004 through Norwood Adam. They also expanded to other countries and had set up other international offices in Europe, Asia, and North America by 2004.

Profits and Early Growth

The company turned cash positive in 2008 and acquired database security firm IPLocks the same year. All 28 employees of the company were extended job opportunities by Fortinite, as a very thoughtful gesture. A year later, they acquired the Ethernet-based company, Woven Systems. By the end of 2009, Fortnite commanded almost 15% of the total market, making them an industry stalwart. CRN Magazine also named them first in security hardware, a huge improvement from the seventh pace they got the year before.

IPO and Huge Success

The company sold 5.8 million shares and raised $52.4 million through its IPO in 2009. Another 6 million shares were sold by stockholders, leading to an increase in the share price from $9 to $12.50. By the end of that one single day, the company had raised over $156 million in financing. Fast forward two years, Fortinet was making $324 million a year, commanding the largest share in the market. In 2013, they launched monthly subscription options for customers with less capital. The company also acquired XDN, Coyote Point, Meru Networks and AccelOps between 2012 and 2016.

New Initiatives

They expanded to new ventures in 2014 by launching a technical certification named Network Security Expert. Two years later, the company found a way to fill Cybersecurity vacancies by launching the Network Security Academy. Through this program, the donated equipment and helped Universities train students for jobs. Furthermore, in 2016 they launched a program that encouraged military veterans to try their hand at Cyber-security, named FortiVet.

They expanded to new ventures in 2014 by launching a technical certification named Network Security Expert. Two years later, the company found a way to fill Cybersecurity vacancies by launching the Network Security Academy. Through this program, the donated equipment and helped Universities train students for jobs. Furthermore, in 2016 they launched a program that encouraged military veterans to try their hand at Cyber-security, named FortiVet.

Research Results

Research predicts that the Cyber-security market will grow 10 percent every year till 2023, and so things look good for this multi-million-dollar enterprise. Furthermore, Fortinet is growing at 20%, being valued at a staggering $13 billion in 2018. Their shares now stand around the $81 mark, which is six times more than their initial listing of $9.

Fortinet headquartered Sunnyvale, California is helping revolutionize the Cyber-security industry, and is now an industry giant. The company continues to grow at over 15%, raking in $416.7 million last year. With over 467 patents and another 291 pending, it is safe to say that the future looks safe and secure for Fortinet; much like how the Cyber-space is, thanks to them!

ASUS Released the Fix for ShadowHammer Malware Pushed on Thousands of Computers

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According to a recent report from Kaspersky, more than a million Asus computers running on Windows operating systems are under a malware threat. A malware named ShadowHammer has been injected to a pre-installed Asus utility software by some unknown hackers, making the software vulnerable to hack attacks.

asus malware

According to the Kaspersky, over 57000 Asus laptop and desktop users reported the issue, and the attack took place between the month of July and November, last year. However, Asus denied the number of reported issues saying that the number of affected laptops is lesser and now, it has finally developed the fix for the malware.

As per the reports, the hacker planted the malware through a back door to the Asus Live Update Utility software, such that whenever there is a new update for the system, the malware is pushed into the system as a new update itself. The size of the malware has also made equal to the utility software.

The company has released a patch in the form of an actual security update, which the users can download through a Live Update software tool. The Live Update software tool has also been updated to the V3.6.8 version. Also, the company has rolled out an online security diagnostic tool that can be used to scan the system for any malicious software.

“We have also updated and strengthened our server-to-end-user software architecture to prevent similar attacks from happening in the future,” stated Asus in a statement.

Though the Taiwanese laptop maker Asus unknowingly pushed the malware to the systems of its customers, it was expected from the company to be apologetic about the matter. The company stated in the news post, “Asus customer service has been reaching out to affected users and providing assistance to ensure that the security risks are removed.”

Asus has also asked the ones with the infected Asus systems to take the backup of their data on the computer. They can fix their systems by simply resetting the system or reinstalling the Window to their computers, as it’s a software-level malware attack.

Todd McKinnon : The Founder of Okta, a Company that Specializes in Enterprise Security

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Taking risks, is what most of the people are afraid of, especially, when they are running in their late 30s. At the time when people are earning enough money by working under someone else, it was Todd McKinnon, who wanted to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Even he was heading a team of more than a hundred employees in his last company and was earning an adequate amount of money to survive in a place like Silicon Valley, he decided to leave the job and just work for his dream. Having years of experience and a great vision, today, he is the founder of a billion dollars company, Okta.

Early Life

McKinnon was born in Southern California and grew up in its bay area. His father was a VP of HR, who worked for various different companies, and his mother was a homemaker.

He completed his under graduation from Brigham Young University, and later, went to the California Polytechnic State University, where he completed a degree in computer science.

Career

McKinnon finds himself lucky, to be born and brought up in the capital of technology. Being a native of Silicon Valley, since his childhood, he was convinced that he would work for an IT company in Silicon Valley.

ToddMcKinnon
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During his graduation, he got recruited by PeopleSoft, in the campus placement, in 1995. At the time, he was building a database application for the recreation department on campus. Co-incidently, the recruiter from PeopleSoft was also working on a similar project and liked Mckinnon’s work and recruited him.

McKinnon was hired as an engineer in the company and received multiple promotions in the span of eight years.

After working for eight long years in PeopleSoft, in 2003, McKinnon left the job and started working at SalesForce. In 2009, he left SalesForce to start his own company, i.e. Okta.

Founding Okta

Besides the dream of working in a Silicon Valley company, McKinnon was also fascinated with the idea of starting his own business. The reason he gives for not starting a business earlier is that he always had good jobs in hand, and those were helpful in gaining good business experience.

In SalesForce, he was managing over hundreds of employees, and he had got a good reputation. He decided that it was the right time to start a business, as he was financially and mentally capable of doing that at the time.

At the same time, people got introduced to the cloud, and not many were sure how long it is going to last. But McKinnon saw an opportunity in the same. He started off developing with a macro product, and when he went out to talk and sell the product to people, he realized there was much more to the cloud, and finally, started working on identity management on the cloud.

McKinnon pitched the idea in over 75 meetings in a span of four to five months. He also asked a former SalesForce colleague, Freddy Kerrest, to join him for the startup, and finally, after seven months of hard, work was able to raise a million dollars seed funding to start the business and founded Okta in 2009. Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage their employees’ passwords, by providing a “single sign-on” experience.

The company earned its first paying client, in December 2009. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion and raised $75 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

In 2017, the company went public, and in its IPO it raised $187 million. Okta has its offices in Bellevue, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, San Jose and Washington D.C., and its headquarter is located in San Fransisco. In January 2019, the company reported a number of 100 million registered users on Okta and the company valued at over $7 billion.

Personal Life

McKinnon is married and has two children. He lives with his family in San Francisco. He is a fitness freak, and in 2017, he was named as the 14th fittest man on earth in the age group of 45-to-49, in the annual CrossFit Games, held in Madison, Wisconsin. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Okta.

Nir Zuk : The Founder of Palo Alto Networks, the American Cybersecurity Company

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Another college drop-out and one of the most successful tech entrepreneur, Nir Zuk, always had a dream of starting his own business. It can be judged through his career graph that he likes to handle things on his own rather than following the order of some superior authority. This genius kid from Israel is a serial entrepreneur, who is really allergic to bureaucracy. The founder of Palo Alto Networks is happy in running a small business than working for a multimillion company.

Early Life

Zuk was born and brought up in Rehovot, Israel. He was in high school when he convinced his parents to buy him a Dragon 64 computer, as a few years ago, one of his friends has also got one. He started learning computer programming by reading books and was capable enough to write small codes, only in a year.

zuk_nir
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When he was sixteen, he started writing commercial programs and earned enough money. At the same time, the first computer viruses very emerging, which caught Zuk’s attention immediately, and he became of the first persons who wrote one of the earliest virus programs.

According to the rule of the Israeli government, Zuk had to go through military training. But as he was a whiz kid, he got a job in the military’s IT department. Alongside his job in the military, he started going to college, where he took mathematics as his majors.

Career

Zuk spent a whole five years in the military, and before he could complete his degree, on the basis of his experience, he was recruited by Checkpoint, in 1994. Here he became the part of the team that was handling a major project and along with them, invented a technology called stateful inspection, which is the basis of network security technology today.

In 1997, Zuk moved to the US, to work at the U.S. head office of CheckPoint in Redwood City, California. After moving to the US, he worked with the same company for two more years and left the job.

Soon after leaving Checkpoint, Zuk went on to found his own startup company OneSecure, in 1999 and started working on the intrusion prevention system that sits behind the firewall, to make sure that the traffic passing the firewall is attack free. The system is the first of its kind.

In 2002, OneSecure was acquired by NetScreen. Even after the acquisition, Zuk retained his position of CTO in the company. Being in the company, Zuk had adviced NetScreen, to build their own firewall, such that it would be more profitable for them, but NetScreen was not ready to take the risk. Hence, after a year, Zuk left the company, to found his own company, and to build its own firewall.

Founding Palo Alto Networks

In 2005, Zuk, after teaming up with 25 of his colleagues from NetScreen, founded Palo Alto Networks. He had raised a total amount of $9.4 million for the startup. Within two years of the inception of the company, in 2007, it released its first firewall product, which was the world’s first “next-generation firewall”.

By 2011, Palo Alto Networks had become one of the most prominent cybersecurity firms and was listed as a leader on its enterprise firewall Magic Quadrant by Gartner. The company went public on the NYSE on July 20, 2012, having raised $260 million with its initial public offering.

In 2014, along with Fortinet, Mcafee, and Symantec, Palo Alto Networks founded the Cyber Threat Alliance, a not-for-profit organization for improving cybersecurity.

The revenue earned by the company in 2018, was estimated to be over US$2.27 billion. Currently, it is providing its service in the field of network security, cybersecurity, cloud computing. The company has got its headquarters situated in Santa Clara, California, U.S.

Avast : Largest Security Company in the World, Fighting the Cyber Attacks

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Having more than 435 million users worldwide, Avast Software is the biggest antivirus providers in the world. Headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, the company was founded by two people who avoided opting for physics in college, to avoid entering into politics and joining Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The thirty years of history of this cybersecurity company once had started with a team of 40 people, and after thirty years, it has approximately 1,700 employees, across its 25 offices worldwide. The company not only have the largest number of global users, but it also had the biggest tech IPO of 2018.

The Founders

Two Czech software engineers Pavel Baudis and Eduard Kucera, founded Avast in 1988 almost 31 years ago, as Alwil.

Eduard-Kucera-Pavel-Baudis
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Baudis was a graduate from the Prague University of Chemical Technology and majored in Information Technology. After graduating from the university, he started working as a Graphics Specialist at the Mathematical Research Institute. In 1986, the first computer virus came into being, and, after two years, in 1988, Baudis wrote the first antivirus program to remove it.

The other co-founder of Avast, Eduard Kucera was born in 1953 and was graduated from the Charles University.

Kucera also worked at the Research Institute for Mathematical Machines, where he met Baudis.

According to Forbes (2017), both Baudis and Kucera are the 8th wealthiest men in the Czech Republic.

Founding Avast

Working at RIMM, Pavel Baudis came across a virus named Vienna and developed the first program to remove it. The success of the program made him think of founding Alwil, a cooperative to develop antivirus, with Kucera.

In the 80’s it was prohibited to have private ownership, so the two co-founders left the Research Institute of Mathematical Machines, in order to found Alwil, under Socialist Union of Youth (the only legal private-owned business entity at that time). They developed the first software named Avast under Alwil.

In 1991, they turned the cooperative into a joint partnership, in the wake of the Velvet Revolution. Due to the Velvet Revolution, there was a huge change in the country’s economy. In 1995, the company released its first antivirus program for Windows 95, written by Alwil employee, Ondrej Vlcek . In the 90s the software became really popular, and Avast received an award from the IT security testing organization, at the Virus Bulletin.

The late 90s were not very good for the company, financially. So in 2001, the company launched a freemium program, in which the users could use its basic product, for free. By 2004, the number of free users grew to a million, and in just two years the number had multiplied twenty times.

In 2010, the company was rebranded as Avast, raising $100 million in venture capital investments. Till 2013, Avast had extended its services in 38 countries, in 43 languages and 200 million people using the software.

In 2014, Avast valued at $1 billion after CVC Capital bought an interest in Avast. The company also launched its mobile app in the same year. In 2015, it became the biggest antivirus company in the world, having the largest share in the market for antivirus software.

In 2016, Avast acquired AVG, for $1.3 billion, and in the following year, it acquired UK-based company Piriform. In May 2018, the company went public on the London Stock Exchange and valued at £2.4 billion. It was one of the biggest technology listings of UK.

Gill Shwed : The Israeli Inventor & the Pioneer of the Cybersecurity

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Computer’s security has been the biggest issue, even if its a PC or a huge work station. Also, as the Internet is a vulnerable place, the data security has become a major concern. But thanks to those who have been working to maintain the cybersecurity, and are, continuously, providing proper protection from various threats and malware. One of such computer scientists, who are responsible for the basic computer security, is Gill Shwed. This Israeli software engineer is one of the extraordinary personalities who has a big share in the development of the cybersecurity and is considered as the inventor of the modern firewall.

Early Life

The 50 years old Israeli software engineer, Shwed, was born Jerusalem, Israel, in 1968. He was merely 13 when he grew interested in computer programming and started practising it. Being a bright student at the school, and having mastered computer programming at a young age, he was able to get enrolled at Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study computer science, at the age of 15. When he got admission into the college, he was still in the high school.

Gill Shwed
Image Source: ifi.today

Career

After completing his education, Shwed joined the Israel Defense Forces and served the Intelligence Corps Unit 8200, where he worked on securing classified networks. Soon after completing the military service, he joined an Israeli startup company Optrotech, as a software developer.

Founding Check Point

In 1993, Shwed joined his hands with Marius Nacht and Shlomo Kramer, to found a computer software and hardware company, Check Point. Nacht was his colleague from Optrotech and Kramer was a friend from his military unit.

The foundation of Check Point was based on the core technology, the stateful inspection. The first product the company launched was the FireWall-1. It then developed the world’s first VPN, the VPN-1. The two products were inspired by Shwed’s work at the military.

Soon, Check Point raised its first round of funding from the BRM Group. Just the next year, in 1994, Sun Microsystems signed an OEM agreement with CheckPoint, and HP too signed the same agreement with the company in 1995. The same year, Check Point established its head office in Redwood City, California. In the following year, the company went public on NASDAQ and raised $67 million from its IPO.

Check Point and Nokia came together in 1998. The two companies bundled their software together, i.e. Check Point’s security software and Nokia’s Computer Network Security Appliances.

Check Point acquired many startups and companies, including Zone Labs (2003), Protect Data (2006), NFR security (2006), Nokia’s network security business unit (2009), Liquid Machines (2010), etc. In March 2018, Check Point along with SanDisk launched Check Point GO, a USB drive to turn a PC into a secure corporate desktop.

In 2016, the company’s revenue was estimated around US$1.741 billion and the net income at US$ 725 million. In the same year, total 3,500 employees were working in the company.

Personal Life

Shwed holds Israeli citizenship and lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 2002, he got featured on the cover of the billionaire issue of Forbes. He has received a doctorate degree in Science from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in 2005. He was named in the list of world’s 100 top young leaders by the World Economic Forum’s Global Leader for Tomorrow. He became the first recipient of Israel Prize in technology.

Apart from programming and computing, Shwed has immense interest in cooking and photography.