Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to find people with experience in Prague?

Vince Steckler: Not too successfully. For the most part, what we did was transplant people. For example, I brought over my old deputy from Symantec to run sales. He ran sales out of Prague for two or three years and groomed one of the Czech guys.

Sramana Mitra: He’s no longer with the company?

Vince Steckler: No, we rotated him back to the States. He runs Corp Dev in the States. His number two in Prague took over running sales. It doesn’t really work well with remote management or transplanted management. You have to have the skills transferred. We’ve done a fair amount of that. Then, we’ve moved heavily into three areas. There are four popular mobile security products in the world. None of them are American. The big ones globally are the two Chinese companies and the two Czech companies—us and AVG. Obviously, we know each other very well. We are very big in mobile. >>>

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 4)

Vince Steckler: It was very intriguing because it was a very engineering-oriented company. Of the 40 people, there was one person in Finance, one person in Marketing and Sales, and 38 engineers. They weren’t doing very good business because there wasn’t anyone paying attention to it. I actually joined there taking what people would probably consider a lot of risk and massive base pay reduction.

Sramana Mitra: They were doing all online?

Vince Steckler: All online. It was a freely distributed product with a premium product. They were one of the early starters of the freemium model. There wasn’t much difference between the free product and the paid product. From the time someone downloaded the free product until the first time they got asked for any money was 15 months. There was just so many obvious things you could do, but it was also a product that had a very loyal user base, which is very important. >>>

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much were they doing at that point?

Vince Steckler: In 2008, they did about $18 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: This was all self-financed?

Vince Steckler: Yes. The company had actually never taken any investment into its treasury. The company, by the way, is a Unicorn. We’re worth well over a billion dollars. They were doing $18 million in 2008 and this year, will do about $300 million. They did meet with some VCs. They found one VC who told them three things. One, don’t diversify your business. Two, you don’t need an investor, which is strange coming from a VC.

Sramana Mitra: Strange and true actually. I’m amazed to see that level of integrity. >>>

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 2)

Vince Steckler: We transformed Asia from Symantec’s worst performing region to the best performing region. I drove that for three years. Then I got posted back to the States to be the number two in the consumer business. I ran the worldwide sales and all the e-commerce and online marketing for Norton. But I was still living in Singapore. My wife and I had a new baby. She didn’t really like living in the US – no family, no friends, and I was on the road all the time. I was actually commuting from Singapore to Cupertino twice a month. I don’t have any sympathy who complain about the one-hour commute. Mine was a 24-hour commute. It’s a long haul.

I calculated the number of days in the US. For two years running, it was 18%. Strangely enough, it was also 18% for Singapore. 18% of my time was in the home office. 18% of my time at home, and 64% of the time on the road. >>>

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 1)

Vince has built a $300 million a year security software company out of Prague, with a global customer base. Fantastic story, a must read!

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

Vince Steckler: I’m originally from LA but I don’t remember much of it. We left when I was two. I grew up in Orange County in a place that we lovingly call Garbage Grove. Its official name was Garden Grove. I was always a geek. I studied Mathematics and Computer Science in school. I finished two Bachelor’s in four years.

Sramana Mitra: Where was that?

Vince Steckler: University of California – Irvine. This was back in the late 70s. I graduated in 1980. I kicked around as a programmer for many years. I worked on, strangely enough, nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons safety. I eventually moved back to the East Coast, working >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I understand what you’re doing. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. You have been in security for a long time. You said you’ve done four companies. Security is a domain where you can only do a startup if you really are a domain expert. When you look around at the current situation in terms of where we are in the industry of the Internet, cloud, and mobile, what are open problems that have caught your eye? >>>

Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You started with the model of doing value-added resellers primarily. VARs are not hugely profitable businesses as you know from your previous experience as well as earlier versions of this one. Can you talk about how the business model evolved as you made this next strategic move into the cloud data center?

Jeff Mullarkey: You’re 100% right on the VARs. That was our biggest frustration. We realized that the reason why a lot of these VARs go out of business is they eventually have a slow month. That slow month drains all their money because they don’t have enough to cover their bills. We, early on, started this recurring revenue model. I knew this was going to be very significant for us along the way. VARs’ growth is limited by the risk of the ups and downs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 4)

Pravin Kothari: We can actually do encryption of the data in such a way that every country’s compliance requirements can be met. The encryption keys are always in the country. It will never traverse the cloud provider side. The issue with cloud provider security is that even if they do encryption, encryption keys are always with them. Customers cannot keep it. That breaks all the requirements that we talked about. Data cannot go out of the country. Security concerns include insider threat. Even though the policies say they cannot look at the data, they can. They have the keys. They have the data. They can open it up. They can do that. The major concern right now is around public cloud. Even though network security is provided by cloud providers, they are not able to address the real pain point that customers have.

Sramana Mitra: In the scenarios that you’re painting like the password breach vis-à-vis Box, how can you handle that? Let’s say you have a client who’s a Box user and Box does something that exposes these vulnerabilities. How do you tackle that on behalf of your client? >>>