Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 8)

SM: Could I summarize your challenge as solving perception versus solving pain? AA: That is a very good way to describe it. There are some proactive people who understand there is a gap.

Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 7)

SM: Tell me how you solved that problem. AA: The ultimate solution was actually quite simple. The simplicity comes from the fact that there are approaches which were around in industry and academia that pretended to be whole products while they were actually subsystems.

Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 6)

SM: Let’s talk about the specifics of FireEye. What is the marketplace like? AA: When I started FireEye I was looking for the boundary of change. I was really looking for a big problem, and getting infected by malware via the Internet is a global problem. I read a lot of literature about how malware

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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.

Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 4)

SM: What are the positives you can take from the first venture? AA: I am gratified now to see that our idea was not stupid. When the company was sold I sent a note to all of my investors thanking them for their support. I told them that whether we were the ones doing it

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Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 3)

SM: A $100M education? Wow! You better have learned the lessons very well! AA: You can’t get that at Harvard or Stanford! The interesting thing was not necessarily about learning what to do, rather it was about learning what not to do.

Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 2)

SM: How did you finally gain that confidence you were talking about to launch your startup? AA: It is completely fortuitous how I finally got off the ground. One of my VPs at Sun became a venture capitalist.

Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz (Part 1)

Ashar Aziz is the CEO of FireEye and a highly technical engineer with extensive knowledge of networking, network security, and datacenter virtualization. Prior to FireEye, Ashar founded Terraspring, a company focused on datacenter automation and virtualization that was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2002. Ashar spent twelve years at Sun as a distinguished engineer. He

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