Ken Xie
Co-founder 2000Background
Ken Xie previously founded NetScreen Technologies and brought deep network-security and firewall-market experience to Fortinet.
Role at Fortinet, Inc.
Fortinet possesses a technical, pragmatic founding story, rooted in the relentless ambition of two brilliant brothers who recognized a fundamental flaw in the early architecture of internet security. The company was founded in 2000 in Sunnyvale, California, by Ken Xie and his brother Michael Xie. Ken Xie was already a legendary figure in the early cybersecurity industry. While he was an engineering student at Stanford in the 1990s, he built a software firewall in his garage and founded NetScreen Technologies. NetScreen was successful because it utilized hardware-accelerated firewalls, and it was eventually acquired by Juniper Networks for a $4 billion. However, following his success with NetScreen, Ken Xie realized the cybersecurity landscape was changing. The proliferation of complex viruses and spam in the early 2000s meant that a simple firewall (which just blocked IP addresses) was insufficient. Companies were being forced to buy expensive, separate appliances for every single problem (one box for a firewall, one box for antivirus, one box for VPN). This was inefficient, expensive, and slow for the network. Ken and Michael Xie founded Fortinet with a foundational, vision: Unified Threat Management (UTM). They believed they could build a single, advanced hardware appliance that could perform every single security function simultaneously without slowing down the network. Because Michael Xie was a brilliant chip designer, they achieved this by designing custom ASIC chips specifically built to inspect network traffic. Their pragmatic, engineering-first approach disrupted the cybersecurity establishment, transforming Fortinet from a small startup into the dominant provider of network security hardware for millions of businesses globally.