Mike Fey: From Symantec to Island and building a $5B category leader

**Sid Trivedi** (0:04)
Welcome to Inside the Network, I'm Sid Trivedi.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:08)
I'm Ross Khalidud.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:10)
And I am Mahendra Ram Singhani. We have spent decades building, investing, and researching cybersecurity companies.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:19)
On this podcast, we invite you to join us Inside the Network, where we bring the best founders, operators, and investors building the future of cyber.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:31)
We will talk about the hard parts of the founder journey. Launching companies, getting to product market fit, raising capital, and scaling to an exit.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:42)
And yes, we will also be talking about epic failures.

**Sid Trivedi** (0:46)
But Mahendra, we're here to make the founder journey easier.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (0:49)
That is correct, Sid. But we cannot make it too much easier, because start-ups are hard.
And of course, you already knew that.

**Ross Khalidud** (0:57)
All right, you too. And now, let's get started with this week's episode.

**Mahendra Ram Singhani** (1:05)
Our guest today is Mike Fey, co-founder and CEO of Island, an enterprise browser start-up that is five years young, has raised $700 million and is valued over $5 billion. Five years, five billion.
A start-up that is rewriting the rules of enterprise security. Mike has spent decades in leadership roles in cybersecurity. As CTO of Intel Security, resident of both Blue Coat and Symantec, he has been through some of the largest acquisitions, combined $12 billion worth and knows this landscape better than almost any other leader. So when he decided to start a company from a scratch, what was it like? What are some hard-earned lessons in starting all over again? Let us find out.

**Sid Trivedi** (2:02)
Welcome, Mike, to Inside the Network.

**Mike Fey** (2:04)
Thanks for having me.

**Sid Trivedi** (2:05)
We're going to talk about a whole bunch of stuff today, but we want to start with your early career and foundations. You started your journey with an ambition to be an aeronautical engineer, and we read that you even worked as a developer at Lockheed Martin for three years.
What were those early years like from being a developer to the career pivot to sales? Those are very different skill sets.

**Mike Fey** (2:29)
They are. I actually wanted to be an astronaut, even beyond aeronautical engineer, and did not achieve either, so double failure. But the enjoyment I got, I ended up in software and writing code and developing. I love writing code. I still do.
My daughter brought home some coding homework a couple months ago, and it was so fun to look at and engage on. I really enjoyed that part of the process, but I got accidental exposure to a customer in one of the projects I was working on, the C-130J Weatherbird, which might be the most American project ever.
If you think about it, what that is, is there's a hurricane coming, we want to learn about it. You could send a drone, you could shoot a missile into it. No, we're going to fly a cargo plane right into it. That's what I got to work on. So that was a lot of fun. But in so doing, we got a lot of feedback from the customer. And I got to understand that conversation with the customer and how we translated that technically became something I really enjoyed. And that was the first slippery slope out of development and engineering towards sales.

**Sid Trivedi** (3:34)
And on that topic, before you got into security, you also worked at Mercury and Opsware. Those aren't security companies. And that was very much mainstream software. What did you learn from that?

**Mike Fey** (3:46)
So those companies have one thing in common that I took from them and really guided me. They were undeniably valuable. Mercury Interactive introduced the world to automated testing. Back then, it was all manual. And we walk into rooms with hundreds of engineers clicking every button to go over and expose to them a better way, automation to do this, a better product, a better outcome. That really taught me the difference between cool software, nice to have software and must have. And we were around for the.com bomb. So what drove up the company was all this development. What kept the company thriving was the ability to add value at the CFO level, right? The CFO to look at his books and say, I need to cut cost. You're the answer, not the problem. And Opsfor was very similar as well. It's entirely an ROI based conversation.
Those two kind of guided me moving forward on what products I thought we should put energy into, what products we should rally around, and which ones got the engineer excited in you, but maybe would not get the customer long-term value delivered.