Orion Hindawi

Orion Hindawi pitched the idea for an IT management company to his father, David, in 2007. Eight years later, the pair helms white-hot cybersecurity startup Tanium. Valued at $3.5 billion, the company has raised more than $260 million in venture capital to date—more than half of that coming from Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz, making it the VC firm’s single largest investment to date. (The father-son duo’s last company, BigFix, sold to IBM for a reported $400 million in 2010.) Hindawi, a technical ace whose product scans and queries the machines on a corporate network in a matter of seconds, has little patience for what he deems to be distractions, he says. “Instead of figuring out which building in Shanghai a hacker came from, figure out how that hacker got data out of your insecure computers,” he counsels businesses, dismissing the specialties of rival cybersecurity firms. “Our industry at the end of the day needs to be more honest with our customers.”