Serial Entrepreneur: Taher Elgamal (Part 10)

Monday, April 2, 2007 | 3 comments

Next we move on to trace Taher’s work after Securify, which is currently back to being a private company, with $9.5 M revenue in 2006 revenue, having achieved 339% growth last year.

SM: Who is running Securify today? TE: The CEO is Buck French. He was actually an investor in the company from JP Morgan partners and decided to step in and become the CEO. I am still on the board and the product is growing. I left as an employee a few years ago. I went around and talked to a bunch of people in the industry and became an advisor to Diamond Head ventures. I have known one of their managing directors, Raman Khanna, since Stanford. I ended up doing more consulting, and talked to some of my friends who used to be employees at Securify. They told me they had developed a better way to detect hacking from the Internet, and I thought that sounded like fun so I started a new company, Ektasis, with Mark and Phil.

SM: What is Ektasis’ charter? TE: It is a framework to run applications off of the network, a cross between software as a service. It runs as a Java Application on the internet, and when the user clicks on it, the application runs on the user machine. There are no version numbers or anything like that, it is fascinating technology. I stayed there for a while, and we received more funding from Diamond Head. Then moved on.

SM: To Tumbleweed?
TE: Tumbleweed is an interesting story. In 1997 I was approached by Paul Kocher. He was a Stanford student. When I was leaving from RSA to Netscape, we hired him. When I first arrived at Netscape I needed security people. I called folks out of Stanford, and asked around. I was referred to Paul, and I invited him to come and participate. He ended up designing a lot of security components for us.

SM: Was Paul the founder of Tumbleweed? TE: No. But Paul founded a company called Valicert while I was at Netscape. He told me they were doing this interesting thing, and asked if I wanted to help out, so I joined the board. Valicert went public in 1998, but it was still a small company. It grew a little bit until it merged with Tumbleweed in 2003. I moved to the Tumbleweed board in 2003. I am still on the board now, so I have been on the board for a while. Tumbleweed is in a fascinating space, which is secure email.

This segment is part 10 in a 13 part series Segment 11 →
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