Sourcefire founder Martin Roesch shares lessons from building a $2.7 billion business

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/sourcefire-founder-martin-roesch-shares-lessons-from-building-a-27-billion-business/2014/06/26/bc6e005a-fcb1-11e3-932c-0a55b81f48ce_story.html

By Steven Overly
The Washington Post
June 26, 2014

Martin Roesch founded cybersecurity software firm Sourcefire in 2001 with 
the goal of making money on a widely used and freely distributed security 
program he had built years earlier called Snort. Twelve-and-a-half years 
later, Cisco bought the company for $2.7 billion. Now that’s what you call 
making money. In an interview last week at start-up hub 1776, Roesch 
shared lessons learned along the way with a gathering of tech and security 
enthusiasts:


Admit what you don’t know.

In 2002, Roesch was flying back and forth between Sourcefire’s Columbia 
headquarters and the offices of West Coast investors. Every time he 
returned, there was a new face in the office.

The company went from four employees to 30 in less than six months.

“I was very, very scared. We were growing so quickly and things felt out 
of control and I didn’t have any experience with what we were doing. I was 
terrified I was going to screw up and kill us all,” he said.

So Roesch made a decision that more egotistical founders might find 
difficult: He hired someone to take over as chief executive who had the 
business acumen to complement his technical know-how.

[...]

--
Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS.
Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less.
Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/