A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 4)

Aviram Jenik: As time passed, there were little engines on the customer side. Java became popular and started replacing what we were doing. The Internet became faster and faster. We shifted towards remote support for something like a printer driver stopping to work. Anybody who had a computer in the second half of the 90s will have a memory of something like this happening. You install a driver. It doesn’t work. You reinstall. You call support. It was frustrating.

Such driver issues and software compatibility were very big issues for a lot of companies. We adjusted our remote engines to do technical support. Instead of calling HP and spending an hour on the phone, we give them instructions. We had an engine that could give the instructions remotely. You would download a small file. That file would tell our engine to do all these things that a remote support person would help you do.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do this business?

Aviram Jenik: It’s hard to say. From start to finish, that was about six years. There were a lot of gray areas. In hindsight, it sounds like it was clear and definite, but it was never like that.

Sramana Mitra: In that six-year time window, what kind of revenue level did you accomplish?

Aviram Jenik: In 1999, before it was sold, I left the company to start another company. When I left, we were at around $4 million in revenue. It continued for a few years without me. It grew close to $10 million. It was then sold to Microsoft.

Sramana Mitra: You made a good exit from that transaction?

Aviram Jenik: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Six years into this company, you left to start another company. What prompted you to leave at that point and what was the idea that you were going for next?

Aviram Jenik: I had a passion for security ever since I was very young. After six years, I felt like I got the point of bootstrapping. I had honed my management skills enough. I’d made plenty of mistakes and learned from them so that I could go and do something from scratch more successfully. I felt like our growth was stalled.

We finished with all the exciting things. We were growing, but it wasn’t huge. We had a really nice team in place. All the people in the core team started their own startups. We had some pretty good talents. I thought they could continue to do well without me. I left on good terms. I left to start my own company. This time, it was me and a technical co-founder. In hindsight, I think it was a great decision because they continued to do well and continued to grow. During that time, I was able to start my own thing. I focused on what I was passionate about.

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking 1999? Where, within the security framework, did you zero in?

Aviram Jenik: We were both passionate about security. We wanted to start something in the security field. When we started, we just said, “We’re going to do something.” We started collecting information about security vulnerabilities. For the first few months, we tried to figure out what we wanted to do. We started collecting information about security holes. There were all these security problems coming out at that time in 1999. We collected information.

We started by putting it online on a security portal so that people could come in and publicly see what are the various security holes. If we had this information, why don’t we build scripts to check for them automatically so that instead of coming to our website to manually look at all the problems, why don’t we tell you if you’re vulnerable or not? Around 2000, it wasn’t called cloud-based.

More and more websites were going on the Internet. More and more companies were going on the Interent publicly. If you connected your company to the Internet, your whole company would be out there in the cloud. It’s a little different than it is now where you got your own private network. At that time, if you had a computer and you were connected to the Internet, you were on the Internet.

This segment is part 4 in the series : A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik
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