How A Professor Learned To Also Be An Entrepreneur – with Stephen Hsu
Just 5 years after launching his company, SafeWeb, Stephen Hsu sold it to Symantec for $26 million. The idea for the business came to him when he was a Physics professor at Yale, where he was put in charge of protecting the department’s network from hackers. Based on the solution, he and his partner created a business aimed at consumers. Users loved the service, but SafeWeb couldn’t turn a profit on consumers, so the company had to make a painful pivot toward the enterprise market.
You’re going to learn a lot in this interview about the evolution of an entrepreneur from a professor with little startup experience to a CEO whose investors insisted stay with the company.
Today Stephen is working on his latest startup, Robot Genius, and he’s still a professor. (Though, as you’ll hear towards the end of the interview, he did pretty well financially from the SafeWeb sale.)
Stephen Hsu is currently the co-founder of computer security company Robot Genius and professor of physics at the University of Oregon. Previously, he co-founded SafeWeb, which he sold to Symantec.
Andrew:
Sponsors
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