Don't ask Tanium CEO Orion Hindawi to apologize for the hard-edged internal company culture or his family's iron grip on the business, all of which have generated a slew of negative headlines recently.
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Controversial Tanium CEO explains why he and his dad have total control of their $4 billion startup
Orion Hindawi, CEO of Cyber security startup Tanium, doesn't believe in pampering employees.
Tanium cofounder CEO Orion Hindawi
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Business Insider caught up with Tanium cofounder CEO Orion Hindawi to discuss the deal, as well as the scathing exposé by Bloomberg that characterized the security startup as a stressful place to work, and Hindawi as a brutish leader.
Tanium is the second startup founded by this father-and-son team. The father-and-son team had worked for about 18 years at the previous company David Hindawi founded, BigFix, which sold to IBM in 2010 for a reported $400 million.
While the deal is good for employees, investors are buying existing common stock, not preferred, so it does not change the founders' ironclad grip on the company, Hindawi tells us.
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"We want to let employees buy the houses, cars or whatever they've been dreaming about and not feel quite as much pressure on the IPO as we otherwise might," he said, adding that he still fully intends to take the company public at some point.
Tanium has allowed employees to cash out of their stock in secondary sales before. They were, for instance, able to sell shares in March, 2015, as part of an overall $64 million investment into the firm that did include the company selling equity to investors
Tanium was valued at $3.71 billion, according to PitchBook, a database that tracks such info. It is one of most highly-valued security startups in the industry.
A-list VC Andreessen Horowitz put Tanium on the map in 2014 when it put $90 million into the company and another $52 million as part of a $120 million round in 2015, led by TPG Capital, T. Rowe Price and Institutional Venture Partners. at the urging of one of its advisers, former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, who called Tanium's technology "magic."
"One of the things that drove us to found this company was that at BigFix, our last company, we had a real challenge corralling the investors to do anything actually. They had the majority of the company so a lot of it was really difficult, frankly, Hindawi said. With control of Tanium firmly in the family, he says making decisions is far easier.
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At the same time, he can understand why former employees might have lashed out.
On the other hand, he also fully admits that the company's culture is rather hard-edged.
"Our business is not easy," Hindawi said. "We're securing the biggest companies in the world, and it's a very big, demanding, stressful thing."
He added: "I want to treat my people with respect and decency. But at the same time, I want them to be in an environment where they can achieve great things, and it turns out great things are not cuddly. They're not easy. It's a lot of hard work.
He believes that part of the reason Tanium gets a bad rap is because it's not a perk-filled, employee-pampering Valley-style startup, he said.
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But with this new secondary offering, the implication is, those who want to cash-out and leave can do so. So can those who want to cash out and stay.
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