This week Palo Alto Networks ($PANW) joined the small, elite club of $100B companies by market cap! The story here is legendary At @sequoia we look for founders with chips on their shoulders -- having an almost irrational sense of purpose Nir "CHKPKLR" Zuk definitely qualified
Nir Zuk was one of the founding engineers at Check Point ($CHKP) CHKP basically invented the firewall, and Nir was the primary developer on this product In many ways, CHKP also started the modern cybersecurity gold rush taking place in Israel
Palo Alto Networks was incubated in Sequoia's offices starting in 2005 @jimgoetz from @sequoia and @chandna from @GreylockVC as VCs partnered with @nirzuk to incubate the company Very quickly @rajivbatra joined as a Co-Founder + VP Eng articles.sequoiacap.com/palo-alto-netw…
The team spent most of 2005 iterating on the idea and also on go-to-market In January of 2006, insights were in place, and Sequoia and Greylock funded the company Palo Alto shipped their first firewall in 2007 and then went public in 2012 (clearly they had PMF!)