Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 5)

SM: How do you, as an entrepreneur, follow your own advice? How do you pursue new opportunities?

AA: I actually maintain a notebook of ideas. I develop multiple ideas in parallel in that notebook. FireEye is one of the ideas from that notebook. The ideas are still written there and I can go back and read how this was developed. I had three other ideas developing at the same time, and they were good ideas as well. In fact a couple of them have been launched by other entrepreneurs and were funded.

SM: If it is a good idea, somebody else must have thought about it also!

AA: Exactly! There are a lot of bright people out there. When I was trying to juggle the sets of problems which were emerging and trying to quantify the change that I could capitalize on the question I asked was “What is my unfair advantage in this picture? What skills do I have, what domain expertise or marketplace knowledge do I have, or what is it that I bring to the table that allows me to have an unfair advantage over others?” I applied that filter to all of the ideas in my notebook and I picked this one.

With this startup it is a combination of virtualization, which I did in my previous startup, and my work at Sun, which is network security. I knew a lot about both areas. I combined them to solve a problem which I knew was going to be huge – the current malware problem. There are multi-billion dollar TAMs around the problem of getting infected via the Internet. Anti-virus and anti-spam products do a poor job of protection against malware via the Internet.

From the perspective of my previous startup, FireEye is a complete domain shift. Going from a virtualized computing infrastructure to security and deep malware control is a big jump. The interesting part is that while the market is different I have been able to leverage my domain knowledge in operating systems, virtualization, and networking. That gave me the unfair advantage to come up with the blueprint for this approach which is unique.

SM: You had a unique combination of domain expertise and technical expertise, which is rare.

AA: It probably is, but it is what gave me the unfair advantage. There are a lot of things out there you can do as an entrepreneur, but when somebody else comes into the picture you have to figure out a way to out-execute them. That is where the unfair advantage principle is useful.

SM: Oftentimes when you straddle different domains you develop a greater ‘unfair advantage’ because most people spend their entire careers in one domain.

AA: Bingo! This is a great point because multiple domain disciplines are hard to put together, especially in a large company. Large companies are very busy doing release 6.5 of the previous 6.0 version. They cannot take many different things and put them together. They do not have the varied domain expertise to put it all together.

SM: Not to mention they are not cross functional.

AA: They are not designed that way. They talk about it because it is a nice buzzword but they are not designed that way. A startup is uniquely designed to pull different people in from these varied backgrounds and build something that straddles domains.

What we do is a combination of very deep system level work in virtualization and operating systems, as well as network level packet processing. In the industry these are two very different things. You may have a company like 3Leaf which is very deep into systems but does not have a network level device. You may also have an IPS which is doing header processing. Combining those two in a single company is very hard. I lose no sleep over the thought that these big giants will come in and replicate what I have done.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz
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