Serial Entrepreneur: Taher Elgamal (Part 5)
Check other articles in the series...Taher has a great background with many security and cryptography companies. Here we track his invovlement in RSA.
SM: What year does that bring us to? TE: 1991. The piece of InfoChip I was responsible for got sold to Cyrex, which is a chip company down in Texas. I ended up leaving, and after calling around to various people, I found a company called RSA. Funny enough they were developing the RSA cryptology which was the competing cryptology to my technology. I talked to Jim Bidzos who was the CEO of the company at the time and who is still a friend. I interviewed over there and he was looking for someone to head up engineering, so it was a great fit. The company was very small. We had six people writing some software. We had just closed some business deals. We had a big contract with Apple, and that ended up becoming Verisign. The initial Verisign product was developed by RSA and Apple. It was a project that I developed way back when.
SM: Why did it become Verisign? TE: Verisign was a spin off of RSA. In 1991 when I started talking to Jim, he told me that RSA would be many things, one of which would be the crypto toolkit, and one would be a service to issue these certificates to people. We used to have a little bank in front of our office, and we talked about buying it and having it become a certificate drive through. That is absolutely a true story. That particular piece of the vision did not come true, but Verisign was in that initial certificate authority business. I ended up running all of engineering; I ran QA and IT, and all the things to make a company look like a company, and I stayed there until 1993, 1994.
SM: What was RSA’s scale factor at the time? TE: How large was it when I joined and left? It was very, very small when I joined. It consisted of six or seven people; Jim, one marketing guy, and the rest of us.
SM: Was this in Boston? TE: No, actually RSA was here at Redwood shores. We were in a building that is currently in the Oracle campus.
SM: In 1993 when you were leaving RSA how far had it come? TE: It was twenty something people, and the revenue was predictable. We had signed a big Microsoft contract, and a big deal with Sun and Apple and some others.
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