In Their Own Words: Kaspersky Lab Cofounder And CEO Eugene Kaspersky
The last couple interviews in the In Their Own Words series have been with CEOs of startups that are a bit more obscure. Eugene Kaspersky, on the other hand, should be much more recognizable to the masses. First, because his company is named after him; and second because Kaspersky Lab has established itself as a dominant force in information security and antimalware.
Eugene Kaspersky is a very interesting and passionate man. I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with him on a few occasions, and he is an exceptionally genuine human being. Eugene is the kind of guy you want in your corner, and the type of person everyone wishes they could work for, and with. In many ways, this was the most fascinating interview I have conducted in this series so far.
About Kaspersky Lab
Kaspersky Lab is ranked as one of the top antivirus vendors globally—competing with household names like
Let’s take a step back, though, and explore the core of Kaspersky Lab. The company has a two-fold mission. First, Kaspersky Lab aims to identify and predict the cyber threats that are coming next. Second, the company strives to develop the necessary technologies, products, and services to defend against these threats. That means researching malware, spam, exploits, DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, cyber espionage threats and more, and then developing the tools to protect against them.
Eugene sums up the mission of Kaspersky Lab like this: “We are here to save the world.” Simple enough.
There were PC security products available already when Kaspersky Lab was founded in 1997, but to be fair that was still before the concept of antivirus became mainstream for either businesses or consumers. Prior to widespread Internet access, malware could only really spread via floppy disk, so it posed a much smaller threat. It was the ILoveYou virus in 2000 that essentially put malware on the map, and put the world on notice that the rules of the game had changed.
The question I had for Eugene was, why? What was the spark or epiphany that led him to think “Hey, I should launch a security company!”?
“When you are at the very start of a long road you do not realize how complicated that road may become. Back in the nineties we were a small team of devoted young geeks and didn’t realize that the mission we want to do is impossible. That’s why we’ve done it,” explained Eugene with a sly smile.
There was no formal process or master plan in place. The founding of Kaspersky Lab was more serendipity than anything. Eugene told me, “It all began in 1989 when I found the Cascade virus on my computer. I got interested, started exploring it and got carried away. Later my friends seeing my interest would bring me other virus samples. And it struck me that there were so many threats and so little protection. So we came up with the idea of developing our own product that would protect everyone from the greatest number of known threats.”
Getting To Know Eugene Kaspersky
Eugene Kaspersky grew up in a very different world than your average Silicon Valley CEO. Eugene was born in 1965 in Novorossiysk, Russia—a port town on the Black Sea. As you can imagine, life for the young Eugene Kaspersky was very different in the former Soviet Union.
For starters, the very concept of “what did you want to be when you grew up?” is different—almost completely foreign. For Eugene, the vast options available were narrowed down to just two. The Soviet Union gave him the choice between becoming a professional yachtsman, or a mathematician. Obviously, he chose mathematician.
Eugene attended the Higher School of the KGB. He recalled, “Back then the Higher School was an inter-ministerial / institutional educational facility sponsored by the KGB, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, and the Soviet Space Program.”
Kaspersky landed at the Higher School of the KGB compliments of the Ministry of Defense (MoD). From the day he enrolled, it was predetermined that he would be sent to work for the MoD upon graduation. Eugene told me the faculty at the school was divided into two distinct—and very separate—groups: the KGB educators, and the MoD educators. Switching from one program to the other was impossible. Put simply, his future was chosen for him.
While there, Eugene studied mathematics, programming languages, and cryptography. He stresses, though, that the greatest emphasis by far was on the math. “They really drummed it into us! Stars of both Soviet and world science taught at the School. My course leader even lectured at Cambridge (by that time the Soviet Union was no more). In all, it was a fantastic school. I believe that the mathematical education given there was the best in the country, if not one of the best in the world.”
Eugene attended the school from 1982 to 1987—finishing in an era when Mikhail Gorbachev was loosening the reins, and making the Soviet Union more politically liberal, eventually leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. In retrospect, the timing of Kaspersky graduating with the education and knowledge he had just as the Soviet Union was collapsing turned out to be serendipitous.
After graduating, Eugene worked at an MoD scientific research institute—as had been determined before he started there. His role was mostly as a software developer—writing custom programs for colleagues. It was there, in 1989, that he came across his first virus—the Cascade virus—and that sparked his passion to understand these threats, and develop ways to guard against them. The rest is history.
Today, Eugene’s passion for antimalware and cybersecurity remains strong. He travels the world as an evangelist for cybersecurity—preaching about the dangers of cyber espionage and other threats, but not in a “sky is falling” manner. Kaspersky is sometimes dramatic, but also very often pragmatic about the challenges we face.
His own technology is somewhat austere by today’s standards—especially for a wealthy tech CEO. He has a simple laptop running Windows 7 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2013. He still uses an old