Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Andrew Rubin: It was in 1998 that I graduated from university.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work in the first job?

Andrew Rubin: I stayed in my first job for under five years.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us to about 2003 then?

Andrew Rubin: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens then?

Andrew Rubin: To make a long story incredibly short, I realized a few things in my first couple of years out of school. The first one was, I decided that I wasn’t going to go back to New York and work in the financial services industry. Some of that decision got a little bit easier because, I’m sure you remember, in 2001, the world changed in a tough way. The second thing was I actually enjoyed tech. I think that it was appealing to the math skills that I always had. It definitely appealed to the idea of building something rather than just using numbers by themselves.

I was able to transition effectively from a sales role into much more of a sales engineering, and even a little bit of product management. I became more and more hands-on on the technology side, but with one very important caveat. I never became an engineer. I never went to the step of learning to write code. The way that I think about it is I became very technical and capable of understanding and talking about technology and the power of it, but I never went to the step of learning to write code. My next step was I transitioned from what was the traditional telecom and infrastructure space into the beginnings of what became security for me.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean?

Andrew Rubin: I didn’t get out of school and immediately go to work on something like the firewall. I actually started off very much on the infrastructure side – the networking side. The transition for me was not to necessarily stop the networking and infrastructure conversation, and start a security conversation. It was more of the gentle transition of going from telecom, infrastructure, and eventually realizing that a lot of what was happening in networking was more and more focused on security. Firewall tends to be a good example of that, but a lot of what happens on the network is actually security. I found myself more and more often talking about it and eventually working for a company that actually participated in that space.

Sramana Mitra: What company was that?

Andrew Rubin: It was called Cymtec.

Sramana Mitra: How long did that last?

Andrew Rubin: They were in what was called the intrusion detection space which was a niche part of the network. It was a very niche part of the infrastructure security space. That is actually what led me out to the Valley just about four years ago. I was with them for a number of years and came to two conclusions. One was I really wanted to get into a company at a very early stage.

I didn’t necessarily have the goal of founding or running a company. I knew I wanted to be there very early on before the product was built and brought to market. I felt that would allow me to use a lot of the things I learned over the years in a much more tangible way. The other conclusion was that if you want to do that in a meaningful way, you have to be in Silicon Valley. For me, the transition was to make the decision to move out to the Valley four years ago.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio
1 2 3 4 5 6 7