The Battle for Your Computer

CHAPTER 6The Love Letter That Leaked—From Personal Security to Systems Security

“I won't invest in ideas or products, I'll invest in people. Ideas are overvalued, and people are undervalued. My experience tells me that when I meet an entrepreneur, it doesn't matter what they've got for me on day one; in two months, everything'll look different, so why should I waste energy on what's just a temporary stage of a project's life cycle? I prefer to leverage my time as an investor to understand the element that isn't going to change dramatically, and that's the people I see in front of me.”

With these words, Gili Raanan describes the experience that he had built up on his long road from rookie entrepreneur to serial investor. Raanan was serving in Unit 8200 just as Check Point's success started to excite the Israeli market. The idea of a firewall to protect against unwanted intrusions ignited people's imagination, and there were many other ways to put it into practice. Several Israeli entrepreneurs decided to take up the gauntlet, and in the first decade of the new millennium, the Israeli cybersecurity industry shifted gears: from an era dominated by one successful company—Check Point—it moved into an era in which former employees of this company and other entrepreneurs started discovering this field and its immense potential for new ventures.

Sanctum: Firewalls for browsers

“Nowadays when entrepreneurs complain about aggressive competition in the market,” Raanan tells me, “I say ...