Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 1)

Peter is a startup veteran who is building a new Cyber Security company from Utah. The key insight to focus on in this story is how he found white space in the mid-market.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Peter Bookman: I was born in Northern California back when there were orchards where Silicon Valley now is. My father worked for IBM. That’s what moved us around quite a bit and also got me coding at a young age. That led me to becoming an entrepreneur as I now live in Utah. I love Utah mostly because of the outdoors. It really helps keep me level-headed and centered as the entrepreneur lifestyle tends to be all over the place.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for college?

Peter Bookman: I did a little bit of college which led to my first company called Phobos based on SSL VPN technology.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that. What year are we talking?

Peter Bookman: We started that in 1995. The original goal was to put the lock in the browsers and keep everything private. At that time, it was very difficult computing power-wise to do so. Within five years after we sold it, it became prolific. Everyone had the computational power to put that in there. We used that same technology to create and pivot the technology to be used for Virtual Private Networks instead.

I was in college at that time. I was working with other people at the University of Utah. I got involved with a company that did remote maintenance. They did a technology that was replacing parts on UNIX servers at that time. We were just listening well to the needs of those customers. The University of Utah happened to be one of our customers. I was both in college there and supplying parts and maintenance.

There was need for some drivers to make the Ethernet to work effectively. That became Phobos. We took care of remote maintenance. We had customers that needed these fast networks. We wrote these drivers. That was a great start and entry point.

The UNIX world accelerated. Before we knew it, there was fast Ethernet. 100Mbps was fast at that time. It didn’t take very long for that to be slow. We were a little bit late on that race. We were still relatively small. We were venture-funded.

Sramana Mitra: You raised venture money in Utah?

Peter Bookman: My VC came out of New York from a venture firm that’s no longer around. They ended up retiring. It was a relatively small boutique firm. There were venture firms in Utah as well. Utah is great for that actually and has been for some time.

Sramana Mitra: Today, Utah is a thriving ecosystem. We’ve done many great stories. Novell was in Utah.

Peter Bookman: I was there at that time when Novell was still thriving. There were a lot of the reasons why technology companies came to Utah. There were a lot of other technology companies. It was interesting to play a role in something that was moving so quickly. By the time it’s time to take this 100Mbps and turn it into Gbps, we were late. We were leaders in the Mbps space. It became a what-else-could-we-do especially when we were making our own card. That’s the challenge that emerged. By the time that next wave came, they had their own drivers. We found ourselves out of the marketplace.

Sramana Mitra: But this company was successful. You did pivot and sell. What was the pivot?

Peter Bookman: We wanted to offload and give them the computational power for the network so they can do these online transactions with privacy that we now are able to take for granted because it’s everywhere. It was an unaddressed marketplace. We needed to develop our own card either way. It took long enough to perfect it. Creating your own chip and laying it out on the board was challenging.

Sramana Mitra: And expensive.

Peter Bookman: It was.

Sramana Mitra: So you had to raise a lot of venture capital.

Peter Bookman: We did. We didn’t have to raise as much as other places. Going from software to developing hardware was a big jump. The hardware and the software were used by SonicWall, the acquirer.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog
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