Part IThe Story
Let Everything Out, Let Nothing In
The first time Gil Shwed's firewall touched the internet, it was not yet a product, and the company that built it could not afford its own connection. It was 1993. Check Point had no office worth describing and no customers. Its one real asset was an idea a twenty-four-year-old had carried out of military service three years earlier. The prototype was carried, more or less by hand, to BRM, the software firm run by the brothers Eli and Nir Barkat, which had put up the seed money and which, as Shwed later put it, "then became an investment company." BRM's network had never been connected to the outside world. Check Point's gateway would be the thing that connected it.
Shwed wrote the rule himself. In the vocabulary he was inventing, it was called a policy, and this one was as simple as a policy can be. Let everything go out, so the people inside could browse wherever they liked. Let nothing come in.
Within five or ten minutes an alert appeared on the console. Somebody was trying to break into the network.
"Being a developer," Shwed told the interviewer Andrew Warner more than two decades later, "when you see something like that then your immediate reaction is there's probably a bug in the software." It was the first time the thing had ever run. Of course it was broken. So he went through the logs, and the logs were not garbage. The IP addresses were real. There were so few Israeli organizations on the internet in 1993 that he recognized the one trying to get in, and so he did what a person does in a small country: he picked up the phone. Who is trying to break into our network from your side? The man on the other end said, of course, it wasn't them, but why don't you come over and look at our network. Shwed went. He found people holding super-user rights on old machines. He followed the trail and found that nearly every Israeli company then connected to the internet was tangled up with the others, "interconnected in the wrong way." The police were called. Within a week or two, by Shwed's account, they had arrested two teenagers.
Everything that came afterward is already in that scene. The rule written before the threat arrives. A boundary that assumes its own violation. The developer's first instinct to blame himself and the engineer's second instinct to read the logs. The small country where you can recognize an intruder by his address. A product that proved itself by failing to be ignored. And the shape of the rule itself: let everything out, let nothing in. That shape would describe a cybersecurity company for thirty years. It would also describe, with unsettling precision, the man who ran it. He would ship his technology to more than a hundred thousand organizations in more than sixty countries and keep his own opinions, his military service, his politics, and for a long time his succession plans behind a wall almost nobody got through.
Thirty-one years later, in February 2024, Shwed stood before the Israeli financial press in his trademark black T-shirt to announce that he would step down as chief executive of the company he had founded. He was the longest-serving CEO of any Nasdaq-listed company. The first slide set a baby photograph of him beside a photograph of the executive. Then, as Calcalist's Sophie Shulman noted, "in his typical fashion, he swiftly transitioned to discussing Check Point's products and cyber threats." The reporters wanted to talk about him. He wanted to talk about the threats. Even his retirement came with a firewall.
By the Numbers
The Check Point Ledger
$250,000Initial BRM funding in 1993 (older accounts put it at $600,000)
40%Check Point's share of the world firewall market by February 1996, per IDC
$14Per-share price at the June 28, 1996 Nasdaq IPO, which raised $67 million
30 yearsShwed's tenure as CEO, the longest of any Nasdaq-listed company
$30BCumulative revenue reached by the company's 30th anniversary in 2023
$1.05BNet income on $2.725 billion in revenue, fiscal 2025
~20%Shwed's ownership stake at the time of his 2024 transition
Four Years Nobody Mentions
Begin with the gap, because that is where every account of Shwed eventually runs into a wall.
"Four years go virtually unmentioned in the official biography," Lea Goldman wrote in Forbes in March 2002, in a profile titled "A Fortune in Firewalls." The years were 1986 to 1990. Shwed was eighteen when they began. He spent them in Unit 8200, the signals-intelligence arm of the Israel Defense Forces, which Israeli press accounts routinely compare to the American NSA. What he did there is mostly inference. Goldman: "His job most likely was to string together military computer networks in a way that would allow some users access to confidential materials while denying access to others." Five years earlier, Joel Greenberg of the New York Times had visited Ramat Gan and come away with the same partial confession, in slightly different words. Shwed "will not say much about where he served in the army, but he does allow that he learned there about linking computer networks with different levels of security clearance."
That is the entire disclosure, repeated across three decades of interviews: networks with different levels of clearance. Some people may see some things. Some may not. A machine has to decide, packet by packet, which is which. Later, when he could tell a slightly fuller version, Shwed said that he had been tasked with connecting classified networks and had found a vulnerability. In Techzine's 2025 conversation he dated the conception of the technology to 1990, years before the World Wide Web became a household phrase. In 2018, at a Nasdaq celebration of the company's twenty-fifth anniversary, he put it in one sentence: "In 1990, we invented the Firewall."
We, in 1990. Check Point would not exist for another three years. Even the founding myth arrives partly classified.
The boy who went into the unit had been, by every account, a prodigy whose prodigiousness took the form of systems administration rather than math competitions. He was born in Jerusalem in 1968. Accounts disagree on whether he started programming at twelve or thirirteen. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry places him at twelve, "in a company that dealt with artificial intelligence." At fifteen he was taking computer science courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while still in high school. At sixteen, according to a 2006 CRN profile, the university put him in charge of its computer systems.
His younger brother, Ran, supplied the story that most perfectly anticipates the adult. The university was weighing the purchase of a mainframe, the expensive, monolithic, institutional answer to a computing problem. The teenager talked them out of it. "He basically told them, 'Don't buy a mainframe, buy several PCs, and I will use software to combine them into a network.'" Cheaper hardware, more cleverness, and the network rather than the machine as the unit of thought. It was the instinct of someone who had already decided that the interesting problem lay in the connections.
He never took a university degree. He would later collect honorary doctorates from the Technion in 2005 and from Tel Aviv University, join the boards of trustees at both Tel Aviv University and its Youth University, and found the Check Point Institute for Information Security there. The institution that let a high schooler run its computers never got around to graduating him. He went to the army. Then he went to a company called Optrotech.
On a podcast in 2025, a host asked whether he had known as a ten-year-old that he was a genius. His answer had the flatness of a man correcting a bug report. "Up to today, I don't think I'm genius. I'm actually usually hanging [out] with people that are much smarter than me. That's one of the secrets to success." Then a concession: "But when I was young I have high motivations. I mean I had the high aspirations."
A Thousand Dollars a Month
Ramat Gan, where Check Point was incorporated in 1993, is one of the suburbs that ring Tel Aviv. It is low, practical, and unglamorous, and it was not long ago farmland. A visiting American blogger who met Shwed there in the mid-2000s was told that the stretch of land around the company's offices was where the Barkat brothers' grandfather, a bus driver, had once grown tomatoes. In the same conversation Shwed offered his own family's version of the national story: "My parents came here, trying to build something new. First agriculture, then infrastructure and today, technology."
The sequence rhymes so neatly that it sounds rehearsed. Tomatoes, then buses, then a venture fund. Agriculture, then infrastructure, then firewalls. Every generation builds its version of the same thing, a perimeter around something worth keeping, and the money that seeded Check Point came from the grandsons of a man who grew vegetables on the plot where the firewall was written. Nir Barkat, one of those grandsons, was elected mayor of Jerusalem on November 11, 2008. Check Point's founding capital, in other words, came from a family that would later govern the founder's birthplace. In Israel the circles are small enough to close.
The three founders fit the same small circle. Shlomo Kramer was Shwed's friend from the unit, the 8200 bond the Times described in 1997 as the source of "a combination of discipline, obsession and anarchic inventiveness." He would stay ten years and then leave in 2003 to build Imperva, becoming one of the most prolific founders in Israeli cybersecurity, a man who seemed constitutionally unable to remain inside another person's company for long. Marius Nacht came from Optrotech, the electro-optics firm that later became Orbotech, where Shwed had gone to work as a software developer after his discharge. Nacht was the operator of the three, the one who stayed longest at Shwed's side, serving for years as vice chairman and then chairman. In 2002 he would earn the odd distinction of falling off the Forbes billionaires list in the same year Shwed lost $600 million and stayed on it. Shwed was the youngest. He was the one with the patent.
The patent was filed on December 15, 1993: U.S. Patent 5,606,668, "System for securing inbound and outbound data packet flow in a computer network." One inventor is listed, Gil Shwed of Jerusalem. The abstract reads like a specification for a temperament: "A filter module allows controlling network security by specifying security rules for traffic in the network and accepting or dropping communication packets according to these security rules. A set of security rules are defined in a high level form and are translated into a packet filter code."
Accept or drop. Rules written in human language and compiled down into something a machine executes without hesitation. The technique became known as stateful inspection. Its essential move was to make a firewall remember context, so that a packet was judged by the conversation it belonged to and not in isolation. It became, and remains, the foundation of nearly every commercial firewall in the world. The patent was granted on February 25, 1997, by which point Check Point was already a public company and the world's market leader.
What the patent does not record is how cheaply all of this was done. Tiernan Ray, who had covered technology for nearly thirty years without once interviewing Shwed, finally got an hour with him on Zoom in late 2022 and extracted the detail that explains the company better than any balance sheet. Check Point, the company whose entire premise was the commercial internet, did not pay for internet access. "We didn't even have a dialup connection to the Internet because it cost a thousand dollars a month and we didn't want to pay a thousand dollars," Shwed recalled. "We actually did our testing on other companies' lines the first year or two."
So the founding scene at BRM was not a demonstration staged for an investor. It was rent avoidance. The firewall was born on borrowed wire because a thousand dollars a month struck its inventor as an unreasonable expense. That instinct never left. Thirty years later it would be the thing investors admired most about Check Point and the thing they most wished he would get over.
There is also a quieter theme in the founding funding. On Leap Academy, the topic header for one stretch of Shwed's account reads "Raising Capital Without VC Funding." Strictly speaking, BRM was an investor. But it was a software company turned backer, not a Sand Hill Road partnership with a board seat and a growth mandate. The sums were trivial: $250,000 by the current Wikipedia account, $600,000 by an older one. The arithmetic of control was settled early. In 2002 Forbes put Shwed's stake at 12 percent. By 2018 it was 19.1 percent. At his transition in 2024 it was roughly 20 percent, and one Israeli business reporter wrote that he owned "almost a quarter." He bought back stock. He kept his own. The wall went around the cap table too.
Five Hundred Dollars, Cash, Las Vegas
In May 1994 FireWall-1 shipped and Check Point went to America. The venue was the Spring Networld+Interop show in Las Vegas, the trade fair where the plumbing of the internet was sold to the people who would install it. Check Point had registered so late that it did not appear in the exhibitor catalog and had to share a booth with another vendor.
Shwed arrived with a stack of FireWall-1 posters and did what an underfunded twenty-five-year-old does: he started putting them up outside the main entrance. A security guard appeared. Shwed told CRN the exchange a dozen years later, still slightly amused.
"The guard said, 'It will cost $500 to post your advertisements here.' I said, 'OK, where and when do I pay?' And he replied, 'You pay me, right now.'"
He paid. You can read the story as a hustler's anecdote, the scrappy foreigner learning how Vegas works, but the more telling moment is the question. OK, where and when do I pay? No haggling, no outrage, no appeal to the conference organizers. The cost of access had been named, the access was worth the cost, and the transaction was simply executed. The same man would not pay a thousand dollars a month for an internet connection he could borrow. He would pay five hundred dollars in cash to a security guard for an entrance he could not get any other way. Frugality, in Shwed's hands, was never about the number. It was about whether the money bought something that could not otherwise be obtained.
Then the organizers informed him that Check Point would need to submit a press release proving FireWall-1 was actually a new product. "We didn't even know what a press release was at that time," Shwed said. So he spent a few hours reading other companies' releases, worked out the genre, and wrote Check Point's first corporate communication himself. It was the developer's method again: read the logs, infer the protocol, produce a conforming output.
The deals that followed were the sort a small Israeli company could not have produced by marketing alone. In 1994 Check Point signed an OEM agreement with Sun Microsystems, which put FireWall-1 inside the workstation vendor that much of the early commercial internet ran on. Shwed has described closing a million-dollar deal after a hundred days of relentless pursuit. On September 25, 1995, Hewlett-Packard signed a distribution agreement making FireWall-1 "available through HP and its reseller channel." The same year Check Point opened a U.S. head office in Redwood City, California, the arrangement that would define the company for three decades: brain in Israel, sales force in America.
It worked with startling speed. In February 1996 IDC named Check Point the "Worldwide Firewall Market Leader," with 40 percent share. On June 28, 1996, the company went public on Nasdaq at $14 a share and raised $67 million, in the same season that brought Yahoo! and the clothing designer Donna Karan to the public markets. The ticker was CHKPF, the trailing F marking a foreign issuer. It stayed that way until March 3, 1999. Shwed was twenty-seven. He has said he took the company public reluctantly, despite his doubts.
The doubt is worth pausing on, because the IPO was, in a sense, the first breach of the founding policy. A public company is an organization that lets the outside in: shareholders, analysts, quarterly scrutiny, the question that would follow him for the next twenty-eight years. When are you going to leave? He told Tiernan Ray in 2024 that he had been asked it "for the past, probably, 28 years since Check Point became public." The firewall's inventor had opened a port he could never close.
Paper Money
For a few years it hardly mattered. Check Point split its stock three times in thirteen months: two-for-one in January 2000, two-for-one again in July 2000, three-for-two in February 2001. By one account the company reached a market value of $20 billion by 2001. In Israel the press called him "Gil Bates." The CIO magazine profile of October 2002 recorded the nickname as "the Bill Gates of Israel" and noted, with something like sympathy, that "you can forgive Gil Shwed for not wanting to discuss his age, which he reluctantly confirms is 34." Forbes had put him on its list of under-thirty-five "billionaire babies."
The 2001 numbers are almost absurd. Check Point earned $322 million on sales of $528 million. Part of that margin, Forbes explained, came from the Israeli tax regime for approved enterprises. Check Point paid 14.4 percent on its pretax income at a time when most U.S. firms paid upward of 34 percent. Its products were installed at more than 250,000 sites, including 90 percent of America's 500 largest companies. Shwed told the magazine, with the careful precision of a man reporting a test result and not making a boast, that FireWall-1 had never been breached.
Then the weather turned. In January 2002 the tech-spending freeze reached Check Point. Revenue for 2001 was up 24 percent, but Forbes noted the company "did some fancy financial footwork to get there," using $4.5 million in deferred revenue. The stock fell 13 percent in a day, to $39, and kept sliding. Shwed forecast just 10 percent growth for 2002 against the 44 percent average annual growth investors had grown used to. Between one billionaires list and the next, his personal fortune fell by $600 million. Microsoft had started bundling firewall features into Windows XP. Cisco was putting firewall software on nearly all of its routers and had just rolled out a consumer device. The giants had noticed the perimeter.
He shrugged it off, at least in print. "It's not how I measure my well-being," he told Goldman. "I do what I like, and there's no reason that paper money should change that."
— Gil Shwed, to Forbes, March 2002It's not how I measure my well-being. I do what I like, and there's no reason that paper money should change that.
It is an easy line to dismiss as the reflex of someone who has never wanted for anything since his twenties. It is also, judged by what he did next, close to literally true. He did not sell. He did not cash out, though, as Forbes observed, his 12 percent stake "could easily bankroll a life of leisure." His response to the reversal was to try to expand the perimeter itself, from the corporate network to the home, the laptop, the "wireless data phones" that 73 million people were already carrying. "Shwed wants Check Point to be the brand name for safe computing everywhere," Goldman wrote, "in the office, at home and on the road."
The reporters of 2002 kept trying to find the soldier or the Israeli in him, and he kept declining the role. "We look at ourselves as a technology company," he told CIO, "not as a military company or as an Israeli company." Check Point had people "all over the world with very different backgrounds and nationalities, but the most interesting thing to me is not how different we are from one another but how much we all have in common." Asked about his future, he described not a destination but a cadence: "My future, I hope, is to continue to figure out where we should be in six months and where we should be in three years. That's the really interesting thing."
Hold on to that sentence about not being an Israeli company. Sixteen years later he would accept a prize from the state of Israel and say he was thrilled precisely because his field was "so closely associated with our country and with Israeli society." Both statements were sincere. The distance between them is the distance the country traveled in the interval, and the distance he let himself travel with it.
The Men Who Walked Out the Door
A wall defines two spaces. Every company Shwed built also produced, as a byproduct, a population of people who left it.
In August 2012, Forbes Israel ran a list of Israeli millionaires sorted by the elite army units they had served in. Shwed was first, with an estimated $1.9 billion. Kramer, his partner from 8200 and Check Point, was fourth, with $500 million. The magazine asked Gadi Amir, a reserve colonel and former chief psychologist of the IDF, why the intelligence-unit graduates did so well. His answer was a backhanded compliment to an entire cohort. "The 'unit 8200' graduates are brilliant entrepreneurs. They have organizational skills but low leadership ability. That is why they exit at the very point a start up needs to be established. They are very good development and innovation, but are weak at overseeing the overall system. That's why they rush to sell their development as soon as possible."
The theory has its obvious exception sitting at the top of the list. Shwed never rushed to sell. He never sold at all. In February 2025, two months into his tenure as executive chairman, he told Computer Weekly: "My pride is in making Check Point successful as an independent company and I want that to continue. I'm just busy making that happen. I'm not busy looking for another company to merge with or be acquired by another company." When President Reuven Rivlin praised him at the 2018 Israel Prize announcement, the praise turned on exactly this point.
— Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, March 2018When Gil Shwed was released from the IDF, he didn't dream about a buyout. Along with Shlomo Kramer and Marius Nacht, he started Check Point, the flagship of Israeli high tech, a company whose innovation and leadership represent us proudly in the world and remains in Israeli hands.
Remains in Israeli hands. The founder who stays is rare enough in Israeli tech to be a matter of state.
The ones who left built the industry around him. Kramer went in 2003 and founded Imperva. Nir Zuk, one of Check Point's first employees, left too. He was the restless, contrarian engineer who, as Shulman put it in Calcalist, "recognized quite quickly that it would be difficult to flourish and develop next to a dominant figure like Shwed, especially if you do not agree with his vision." Zuk founded Palo Alto Networks, which became Check Point's most humiliating benchmark: the road not taken, visible every quarter from Shwed's window. Zohar Alon worked at Check Point in the 1990s and built Provider-1, its multi-tenant management product. He left, founded the cloud-security company Dome9, and in October 2018 sold it back to Check Point for $175 million. On LinkedIn, someone commented on the announcement: "The old team back together...." Another commenter, studying the photograph of Shwed beside Alon, wrote: "I don't know how Gil keeps that T-shirt so black!"
The industry calls this the "Check Point mafia," the alumni network that seeded much of Israeli cybersecurity. Alon Arvatz, a Unit 8200 alumnus and founder himself, interviewed Shwed, Kramer, Zuk and dozens of others for his book The Battle for Your Computer: Israel and the Growth of the Global Cyber-Security Industry. The thesis the book circles is the one Check Point's history makes impossible to avoid: the first mover educates the market, and the followers harvest it.
Not every departure was amicable. In 1999 Check Point co-founded SofaWare Technologies with Adi Ruppin and Etay Bogner to carry its technology down-market, to the small businesses and households Shwed had been eyeing in 2002. It worked. By the fourth quarter of 2002, SofaWare's Safe@Office appliances, sold under the Check Point brand, held the number-one revenue position in the worldwide sub-$490 firewall appliance market with 38 percent share. Then the relationship curdled. In 2004 Bogner sought to bring a derivative suit claiming that Check Point, which owned 60 percent of SofaWare, was withholding money owed for the use of SofaWare's technology. A court eventually ordered Check Point to pay 13 million shekels for breach of contract. In 2006 a Tel Aviv district judge allowed Bogner to sue by proxy for $5.1 million. Check Point appealed and lost. In 2009 Israel's Supreme Court ruled that SofaWare's founders, acting together, held a veto over the subsidiary's decisions. In 2011 Check Point settled everything and bought out Bogner and Ruppin. Twelve years from partnership to wholly owned subsidiary, with the Supreme Court in the middle. The firewall's maker had discovered that some things, once let in, cannot be easily dropped.
Letters From Outside the Wall
Richard Stiennon had been close to Check Point from the start. In the mid-1990s he was director of business development for a reseller in Detroit, and he sold the first enterprise firewalls to much of the American auto industry, most of them Check Point's. He introduced Kramer to Bob Moskowitz, who was leading the Automotive Industry Action Group's effort to standardize VPN encryption on IPSec. Check Point, which had settled on a different protocol, switched. Stiennon later accompanied two young Check Point engineers to MCI's lab in Plano, Texas, for the first IPSec interoperability bake-off. Then he went to Gartner, where he built the Firewall Magic Quadrant. At one point he took every firewall vendor out of the leaders' quadrant for lack of vision.
Sometime after NetScreen's sale to Juniper, Stiennon published an open letter in Network World addressed "Dear Gil," and it is one of the stranger documents in enterprise-software history: a friend of the family standing outside the gate and shouting. "I have been perplexed by Check Point's actions, or rather lack of actions, for the last seven years," he wrote. Then came a cascade of rhetorical questions. "Do you not see the warning signs when you lose your major accounts to competitors? Do you not watch the network security start up activity in Silicon Valley?" NetScreen had entered the market late and reached a $4 billion valuation by the time Juniper bought it. Check Point had just failed in an attempt to buy the company commercializing Snort, the open-source intrusion-detection system. To Stiennon this was "the final sign I needed that you do not understand the network security market."
His prescription ran directly against everything Shwed believed. First, move the company to the United States: "the location of a corporate headquarters ... is not a lifestyle decision, it is a business decision." Second, stop selling software and sell hardware appliances, because the existing model meant "giving away half the revenue of a firewall sale and most of the support revenue."
Shwed did not move. He eventually did the second thing, in his own way. He had partnered with Nokia in 1998 to bundle Check Point software on Nokia's security appliances. In April 2009 he bought Nokia's security appliance business outright, along with its operating system, IPSO, a hardened fork of FreeBSD. (A small, perfect detail from IPSO's history: Nokia's engineers had planned to number one release 3.10, but Check Point's software "could not process a two-digit dot version," so the release became 4.0. The partner's version numbers bent to fit Check Point's parser.) By then the company was selling a unified architecture with a single management console, and soon after, its "software blade" model. In 2004 it had already bought Zone Labs and its consumer ZoneAlarm brand, the old dream of protecting people at home. Over the next two decades came Hyperwise, Dome9, Avanan, Perimeter 81 for $490 million in 2023, Atmosec, Cyberint, Veriti, and Lakera for $300 million in 2025. Then three more in 2026 alone.
"Over the years, we acquired 20 companies after being told we weren't buying enough," Shwed said in February 2024. The sentence keeps a measured tone, but it carries a grievance.
The grievance had a name, and the name was Palo Alto Networks. Zuk's company, run by the former Google executive Nikesh Arora, did everything Shwed would not. It handed out stock so generously that its CEO became a billionaire as an employee. It spent about $5 billion on acquisitions. It accepted years without GAAP profitability in exchange for growth. Investors rewarded it with a valuation that dwarfed Check Point's. On the day of Shwed's retirement announcement, Check Point's market capitalization was $19 billion, roughly what one account says it had already reached in 2001. Shulman's verdict in Calcalist was the cleanest statement of the case against him.
— Sophie Shulman, Calcalist, February 2024If there is something that the investors are signaling to Shwed and whoever will replace him in the position, it is that in the long term they still prefer phenomenal growth and bold moves, provided they succeed, of course, over conservatism that sanctifies profitability.
And yet there is 2022. That year the Nasdaq Composite fell 32 percent and U.S.-listed software stocks fell an average of 46 percent. Palo Alto, Fortinet and Cisco fell between 25 and 86 percent. Check Point rose 8 percent. "What happened last year was the proverbial flight to quality," Ray wrote, to a company with "among the highest margins in software" and "a simply stellar record of topping expectations back to its IPO." The thousand dollars a month he would not pay in 1993 had compounded into a fortress balance sheet. The headline Ray put on that interview was a line of Shwed's, and it fit him better than any of the nicknames ever had: You don't pick your battles, they pick you.
Shwed has never fully conceded the argument. He has conceded the side of it that concerns him. "Of course, we could have grown more aggressively in marketing and sales," he said in 2024. That September he told Ray that the company's biggest challenge was "translating that technology, brand and expertise that we have into higher growth. I think we can do it." In February 2025, Check Point announced a partnership with Wiz under which Wiz's cloud-native application protection would replace Check Point's own CloudGuard offering inside the suite. The company that once wrote every line of its own code had found a part of the perimeter it was willing to let someone else guard.
Opinions Held Inside
The people who worked closest to him describe a man who is quiet in the way a well-configured system is quiet. "He's probably the most successful entrepreneur whose name you don't often see or hear mentioned publicly," said Jerry Ungerman, Check Point's longtime vice chairman, in 2006. Ray Rothrock of Venrock, a board member, was more precise.
— Ray Rothrock, Venrock, to CRNHe's a pretty quiet guy who doesn't have to dominate the conversation and beat you about the head to get your attention. He's careful when he speaks and only speaks about things he understands, and he likes to dig in and go deep on everything.
Rothrock added a detail that softens the portrait without contradicting it. Shwed is an avid cook, and he has been known to hold management meetings at his home, where he prepares multicourse meals for branch-office managers flown in from around the world. "It's a very effective management tactic," Rothrock said. It is also the most intimate permission the man seems to grant: the outsiders, carefully chosen, let into the kitchen.
The rest of the uniform is well documented. The black T-shirt is so constant that Calcalist called it "eternal." He told a visitor once that wearing all black is "practical" for someone who travels as much as he does. For a few months in 2006 he rode a Segway to work. One writer, quoting an earlier book, described him as a "boyish looking bachelor with cropped hair and John Lennon glasses," which was true at the time and is no longer: he has six children, three with his first wife, Hamutal Einhorn, and three with his current wife, Meytal Danino Shwed. The visitor who met him on Ha'solelim Street remembered most "his dry and serious wit." Shwed told a story about traveling around the country as a child with his resourceful mother. "She'd see a dairy and stop," he began. The account that survives breaks off there, which seems about right. Even his anecdotes come with a dropped packet.
For thirty years the strictest rule he enforced was about politics. Israel convulsed around him: intifadas, elections, the disengagement from Gaza, wars in Lebanon. Through all of it the country's most prominent technology executive said almost nothing. On July 26, 2023, at a press conference following second-quarter earnings, in the middle of the national fight over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul, he finally opened the gate a crack, and mostly to explain why it had been closed.
"The recent events are difficult for all of us, we see the rift in Israeli society and it hurts us all. I am focused on ensuring that this rift will not be part of Check Point. It is not easy, but we succeed because we leave politics out of the company. Our employees can demonstrate and participate, and we are in favor of democracy, but this is the line we decided on a long time ago."
Then came two sentences that land with startling force from a man who had kept the policy for three decades.
— Gil Shwed, July 26, 2023I have been keeping my opinions to myself for 30 years. I wish that if I voiced my opinion it would make a difference to someone, unfortunately it will not have an effect.
And then the one that made headlines: "For years we fought for the registration of our activity in Israel and we have been here for 30 years, but I don't know if this is what would have happened today. Neither on the economic side nor on the political side."
It is easy to misread this as a threat to leave. It was the opposite. In the same breath he said, "I don't believe in relocation, and it doesn't exist in our model." He said that when he met Israelis who wanted to move abroad, he tried to convince them to stay. He was proud that Israelis working at companies Check Point had acquired abroad had come back because he talked them into it. A founder who had once insisted Check Point was not an Israeli company was now spending his own persuasive capital to keep engineers inside Israel's borders, while saying aloud that he was no longer sure he would choose those borders again.
The contradictions had been building for years. In 2002: not a military company or an Israeli company. In 2018 came the first Israel Prize ever awarded in technology, created in honor of the state's seventieth birthday and presented on Independence Day. The education minister, Naftali Bennett, himself a former tech founder, declared that Shwed's "story is the story of Israeli high-tech" and that as "an alumnus of 8200 who founded Check Point, he paved the way and was an inspiration to me and to thousands of Israeli high tech entrepreneurs." Shwed said he was thrilled, "especially in a field that is so closely associated with our country and with Israeli society." The other laureates that year included the novelist David Grossman and the journalist Ron Ben-Yishai. The selection committee cited the "thousands of jobs" and the demonstration "worldwide [of] the excellence of Israel's human capital." He was no longer the Israeli who refused to be an Israeli company. He was the national exhibit.
The wall had grown more complicated at the edges, too. As of December 2023, Check Point still operated in Russia, kept its Moscow office open, and drew public criticism for doing so. The company said nothing in particular about it, which was, in its way, also a policy. Then came October 7. In March 2024, at the company's CPX conference in Vienna, Shwed wore a yellow ribbon for the hostages held in Gaza and told El País that roughly 5 percent of Check Point's workforce had been called up to the army. "From the first day, we've insisted that we keep business as usual and deliver on all of our commitments." The war had come inside the building. He managed it as an operational load.
In June 2025, with the country at war for 612 days, Check Point announced that it would hire 500 R&D employees in Israel, expanding its local R&D headcount by 25 percent, and invest NIS 500 million in real estate. The trend in Israeli tech ran the other way. Asked where the optimism came from, Shwed gave the most nakedly temperamental answer of his public life: "If you don't have optimism, you don't belong in business. I hope in our case it's supported by data."
The Baby on the First Slide
"I embarked on the journey called Check Point exactly 31 years ago this week," Shwed said on February 6, 2024. The baby photograph was on the screen. "I was 24-years-old when we started the company." (Nearly every profile ever written says twenty-five. CIO split the difference in 2002: "just shy of 25." The founder's own count is the youngest one.) "And now, especially after the last quarter, the timing is perfect because we are on a positive trend, the results are excellent, and I am very confident in the company's performance. We peaked on all levels, including the stock."
Someone asked whether he would be offended if the stock rose on news of his departure. He chuckled. It rose 1 percent.
The analysts split along predictable lines. Shaul Eyal of TD Cowen wrote that "a future incoming sales-driven CEO would be viewed favorably," which was the market's polite way of saying what it had been saying for years. Dan Ives of Wedbush called the transition "a net negative" and then reached for the hagiographic register sell-side analysts reserve for founders on their way out: "Shwed is an absolute legend and is the Godfather of the cyber security and broader tech landscape."
His own explanation was practical. The CEO's job, he told El País, was "having 12 or more half-hour meeting[s] every day." To Ray he described it as "ten or twenty meetings every day, handling a lot of different subjects," leaving "very little time to think about the future of cyber, about the future of technology." He wanted to go back to the thing he had done in 1990, before there was a company: think about the threats that did not have names yet. The man who had spent thirty years assigning "generations" to cyberattacks, telling enterprises they were "two generations behind," and building products against a "fifth generation" of mega-attacks, wanted to stand at the console again and wait for the alert.
The successor was not who most people expected, and was also exactly who you would expect. Nadav Zafrir had commanded Unit 8200, the unit Shwed had entered as an eighteen-year-old in 1986 and refused to discuss ever since. Zafrir established the IDF's Cyber Command, retired as a brigadier general, co-founded the company-builder Team8, which built or invested in more than forty companies, and chaired SolarEdge's board for five years. He was, in other words, the institutional father of the whole 8200-to-startup pipeline that Gadi Amir had diagnosed as brilliant at invention and poor at stewardship. Now he was being handed the one company in that pipeline that had never been sold. The chief technology officer who would serve under him, Jonathan Zanger, had led R&D for 8200 and held a bachelor's degree in computer science and physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the degree the university's teenage systems administrator never collected. The circle closed so tightly it nearly squeaked.
Zafrir took over in December 2024. Six months later, at Calcalist's Growth Conference, the editor-in-chief Galit Hemi asked Shwed whether the headlines calling his departure "long-overdue" were insulting. He answered with something close to tenderness. "Check Point is like my family and my child. I'm proud of what we've built, and we deserve criticism, precisely because Check Point is a successful company. I demand more from myself and from the company." Then he said the thing that founders of his longevity almost never say.
"I had several internal candidates and may regret not stepping aside earlier and letting one of them lead."
Of Zafrir he said: "It's hard not to be taken by him." And then, explaining why he had looked outside the walls for the first time in thirty-one years: "Our goal was to bring in someone new who could lead real change. More of the same isn't enough, we all deserve innovation."
Shrubs Instead of Glass
He did not leave. He became executive chairman, and in the first weeks of the new arrangement he flew to Bangkok and Vienna for the company's CPX conferences and talked about generative AI. "Just like the internet, generative AI can change everything," he said. "It may or may not happen, but right now, the odds are that it will be relevant." At an event in the Americas he said, more bluntly, "We all need to be in AI." In September 2025 Check Point paid $300 million for Lakera, an AI-security company. In 2026 it bought a startup that controls the identities of AI agents, software that acts on its own inside networks and has to be told, rule by rule, what it may touch. It is the same problem he solved in 1993, in a new form: what to accept and what to drop.
The threats he described in these late interviews were bigger than the ones in the logs at BRM. "The amount of software is 1,000 times greater than what it was 30 years ago," he told El País. "The risk is at an all-time high and will probably stay that way." Years earlier, answering questions on Quora, he had written the sentence that serves as the quiet creed of his whole industry: attackers do not need you to look like an attractive target. "We simply need to have a vulnerable point. Yes, we are all targets."
Check Point long ago left Ramat Gan, the old tomato fields, for Tel Aviv, and in May 2007 settled at 5 Shlomo Kaplan Street. In 2018, the same year the state gave its founder the first prize it had ever awarded for technology, the company did something to the building that its engineers might once have found faintly absurd. It covered the façade in plants. Haaretz ran the story under a headline that translates as "Shrubs instead of glass," reporting that it was the largest green wall in Israel.
So the company that invented the wall now works behind a living one, rooted in the street, open to the weather, watered every day, growing toward the light. And most mornings, people say, a man in a black T-shirt walks through it and goes inside.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below come from the record of a single founder-CEO who ran one company for thirty-one years without selling it, merging it, or moving it. Some are worth copying. Some are worth studying as warnings. The best are both at once: the same discipline that made Check Point one of the most profitable software companies ever built is the discipline investors spent two decades asking him to relax. Each principle draws on evidence from Part I and ends with a single tactic.
The principles
- 1.Solve a critical problem with a simple mechanism.
- 2.Write the default policy before the threat arrives.
- 3.Borrow the line; buy the entrance.
- 4.Build for customers six thousand miles away.
- 5.Rent someone else's distribution before you build your own brand.
- 6.Own enough to never be bought.
- 7.Treat margin as a moat—and audit what it costs you.
- 8.Name the generations, and you own the timeline.
- 9.Keep politics outside the firewall.
- 10.Expect your best people to leave, and keep the door open for their return.
- 11.Read the outside critics as threat intelligence.
- 12.Step down at the peak—and admit the peak was later than it should have been.
Principle 1
Solve a critical problem with a simple mechanism
Shwed's own summary of his founding insight is almost aggressively plain. "You need [to] address a critical problem with a simple solution," he told Dataquest in 2019. "A complex problem with a complex solution will not work. I was lucky when I started, the Internet was at a nascent stage and my solution was fairly simple." The patent abstract confirms it. Security rules are written "in a high level form" and "translated into a packet filter code" that accepts or drops packets. One idea, sole inventor, a single verb pair.
The simplicity was not naïve. Stateful inspection was a sophisticated insight, judging each packet by the conversation it belonged to, but it presented the customer with a legible model: write a rule, the machine enforces it. The teenager who told the Hebrew University to skip the mainframe and network some PCs had the same reflex. Put the cleverness in the software, keep the interface to the world simple, and make the network, not the box, the unit of design.
Simplicity at founding is not the same as simplicity forever. Shwed himself described the industry's later "inflection point" as the arrival of complexity: "more and more threat actors... the manifestation of the threat is materializing in many different ways." Check Point's later struggle to communicate a sprawling platform is the shadow of how clean its first product was.
Tactic: Before you build, write your product's core mechanism as one sentence a customer could repeat. If you can't, you have not yet found the simple solution to the critical problem.
Principle 2
Write the default policy before the threat arrives
The first rule Shwed ever wrote on a live network was a default: let everything go out, let nothing in. Five or ten minutes later, it caught an intruder. That scene encodes a lesson most operators learn too late. The most important decisions in any system are its defaults, the rules that apply when nobody is paying attention, and those defaults have to be in place before you know what you need them for.
Shwed ran Check Point the same way. The politics-out-of-the-company rule was, he said in 2023, "the line we decided on a long time ago." It was not improvised during the judicial-overhaul crisis. It was a default set in calm conditions, so that when the rift came, the company had a policy and not a debate. The no-relocation stance was another default: "it doesn't exist in our model." Defaults saved the cost of deciding under pressure.
The weakness of this approach is the developer's first instinct in the BRM story: when the alert fires, assume the system is broken. Shwed's discipline lay in the second step. He read the logs, found the addresses were real, and accepted that the policy had worked and the world was hostile. Defaults are only valuable if you trust them enough to believe their alarms.
Tactic: List the five situations in which your organization is most likely to be forced into a fast, emotional decision, and write the default response for each now, while nothing is on fire.
Principle 3
Borrow the line; buy the entrance
Two anecdotes sit side by side. In 1993 Shwed would not pay a thousand dollars a month for an internet connection. Check Point did its testing "on other companies' lines the first year or two." In May 1994 he paid $500 in cash, without argument, to a Las Vegas security guard for the right to hang posters outside Networld+Interop. OK, where and when do I pay?
The two are consistent. The principle is not "spend little." It is: never pay for what you can borrow, and never haggle over what you cannot get any other way. The internet connection was a commodity available on BRM's network. The entrance to the American trade show where FireWall-1 had to be seen was scarce, time-bound, and worth far more than $500. The same reflex shows up in his refusal to buy the university a mainframe and in the 14.4 percent tax rate Check Point secured in Israel.
Thirty years on, the result was a company with "among the highest margins in software." The lesson for operators is to separate spending into two piles, the substitutable and the singular, and to treat them with opposite temperaments.
Tactic: Go through your top twenty expenses and mark each as "borrowable" or "singular." Cut the first category hard, and stop negotiating on the second.
Principle 4
Build for customers six thousand miles away
"One thing that really helps us here is that we don't have a local market," Shwed told a visiting group in Tel Aviv. "What if we had started Check Point in Boston rather than Tel Aviv? Here, we think more globally... We are thinking of customers who are 6,000+ miles away from home."
What Stiennon saw as a liability, an Israeli headquarters far from American customers, Shwed treated as a forcing function. No home market meant no temptation to build a regional product, design for a single language, or mistake local traction for product-market fit. It also meant, in his telling, distance from noise: "Because they are far away from the energy of Silicon Valley, they are focused on products and listening to customers, not the hype and latest trends." Employees stayed three to five years or longer and "don't feel as if they're being left behind."
The same distance carries a cost Shwed later acknowledged. Being far from the trend machine also meant being slow to some trends that turned out to be real, cloud above all. Distance protects focus and delays recognition. Both effects are real.
Tactic: Write your product's requirements as if your nearest customer lives on another continent and speaks a different first language. Then decide which of your local assumptions survive.
Principle 5
Rent someone else's distribution before you build your own brand
Check Point did not become a market leader by out-marketing anyone. Within two years of shipping, it had an OEM agreement with Sun Microsystems (1994), a distribution agreement putting FireWall-1 into "HP and its reseller channel" (September 25, 1995), and 40 percent of the world firewall market by IDC's count (February 1996). In 1998 it added Nokia, which bundled Check Point software on its security appliances. In 2009 it bought that appliance business outright.
The sequence is a template. First, embed your technology inside the products of companies customers already trust. Second, let those partners' sales forces educate the market. Third, once the category is established and the partner's business is worth less to them than to you, absorb it. The Nokia arc, from bundling partner in 1998 to acquired business unit in 2009, took eleven years and ended with Check Point owning the hardware Stiennon had told it to build.
C
From Borrowed Channel to Owned Platform
How Check Point used partners, then absorbed them.
1993
Prototype tested on BRM's network; company tests on other firms' lines rather than paying $1,000/month for its own.
1994
FireWall-1 debuts at Networld+Interop Las Vegas; OEM deal with Sun Microsystems.
1995
HP distribution agreement; U.S. office opens in Redwood City.
1996
IDC names Check Point world firewall leader at 40% share; IPO at $14 on June 28.
1998
Nokia bundles Check Point software on its security appliances.
2004
Acquires Zone Labs, bringing ZoneAlarm and endpoint security in-house.
2009
Acquires Nokia's security appliance business, including the IPSO operating system.
2025
Partners with Wiz, replacing its own CloudGuard CNAPP inside the suite.
Tactic: Identify the one company whose sales force already sits in front of your ideal customer, and design your first product so it can ship inside theirs.
Principle 6
Own enough to never be bought
Gadi Amir's verdict on Unit 8200 founders, "they rush to sell their development as soon as possible," describes the default exit path of the Israeli tech economy. Shwed never took it. He funded the company with a tiny seed round, avoided conventional venture capital, took the company public instead of selling it, and held 12 percent in 2002, 19.1 percent in 2018, and about 20 percent in 2024. "My pride is in making Check Point successful as an independent company," he said in 2025. "I'm not busy looking for another company to merge with or be acquired by."
Independence was not sentiment. It was a structural defense. A founder with a fifth of the company and a thirty-year record of beating expectations cannot easily be pushed into a sale, a merger, or an activist-driven restructuring. That ownership also explains why he could wave off the $600 million paper loss of 2001–2002. "There's no reason that paper money should change that."
The price of this independence is that no one can make you change. The same structure that blocked acquirers also insulated him from the growth-first pressure that might have pushed Check Point to Palo Alto's scale. Control protects strategy, including bad strategy.
Tactic: Model your ownership at every future financing and decide in advance the percentage below which you could no longer refuse a sale. Then don't cross it.
Principle 7
Treat margin as a moat—and audit what it costs you
In 2001 Check Point earned $322 million on $528 million of revenue. In 2022, when software stocks fell an average of 46 percent, it rose 8 percent on what Ray called "the proverbial flight to quality." Few software companies have ever sustained profitability like it. It came from frugality, a favorable tax regime, and a refusal to pay for growth with stock.
The case against it is just as concrete. A market cap of about $19 billion in February 2024 against an estimated $20 billion in 2001. Palo Alto, founded by Check Point's early employee Nir Zuk, spent roughly $5 billion on acquisitions and paid out stock lavishly. It outgrew its parent's shadow. Shwed's own concession was brief: "Of course, we could have grown more aggressively in marketing and sales."
⚖
Two Theories of a Security Company
The road Shwed took versus the one his former employee took.
| Dimension | Check Point under Shwed | Palo Alto Networks under Zuk and Arora |
|---|---|---|
| Priority | Profitability Among the highest margins in software | Growth Profitability sacrificed "on the altar of growth" |
| Acquisitions | About 20 over three decades, many small | About $5 billion spent on a series of bold deals |
| Employee equity | Conservative; founder holds about 20% | Very generous; CEO became a billionaire as an employee |
| Cloud transition | Risk Critics say it missed the early jump | Embraced early |
| 2022 bear market | Defense Stock up 8% | Stock down sharply with peers |
The right conclusion is not that either theory wins. Margin is a moat in a downturn and a ceiling in a boom, and the founder's job is to know which season it is.
Tactic: Once a year, write down what your margin discipline cost you: the deals not done, the hires not made, the markets not entered. Decide explicitly whether the trade is still worth it.
Principle 8
Name the generations, and you own the timeline
Shwed is an engineer who rarely does media, yet he built one of the most durable framing devices in enterprise software. He sorted cyberattacks into "generations." At the Nasdaq event marking Check Point's twenty-fifth anniversary: "In 1990, we invented the Firewall to prevent second-generation attacks; and today we are the only cyber security vendor with the complete architecture to overcome the fast-moving, mega-scale fifth-generation cyber threats." Enterprises, he said, were "two generations behind."
The device does three things at once. It casts Check Point as the originator of the category, because whoever numbers the generations was there for the first. It turns a customer's security gap into a measurable lag. And it makes the next purchase feel like an upgrade instead of a gamble. It is the framing equivalent of stateful inspection: it gives each threat a context, the conversation it belongs to.
It works best when the founder's credibility backs the taxonomy. Shwed's patent and thirty years of continuity gave the numbering authority. A newcomer announcing the "sixth generation" would sound like marketing.
Tactic: Define the stages of your market's evolution in public, place your product at the latest stage, and repeat the taxonomy until competitors have to answer it.
Principle 9
Keep politics outside the firewall
For thirty years Shwed refused to make Check Point an arena for Israel's political fights. "We succeed because we leave politics out of the company. Our employees can demonstrate and participate, and we are in favor of democracy, but this is the line we decided on a long time ago." Employees, he said, thanked him "for making it possible to work in a pleasant environment."
The policy is a firewall in a literal sense. Employees' political lives flow outward freely; the company does not let political conflict back in. Even his one public break, in July 2023, was mostly a defense of the rule: "I have been keeping my opinions to myself for 30 years." Neutrality also let him serve two audiences at once. In 2002 he insisted Check Point was not "an Israeli company." In 2018 he accepted the Israel Prize with pride. A company that takes no side can be claimed by many.
The limits are real. Neutrality is itself a position, and continuing operations in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine drew criticism that silence did not deflect. A no-politics rule protects culture. It does not exempt the company from the consequences of its commercial choices.
Tactic: Write a one-paragraph statement of what your company will and won't take public positions on, publish it internally before any crisis, and enforce it equally on causes you personally support.
Principle 10
Expect your best people to leave, and keep the door open for their return
Shlomo Kramer left in 2003 to found Imperva. Nir Zuk left to found Palo Alto Networks. Zohar Alon left and founded Dome9, which Check Point bought back in 2018 for $175 million. "The old team back together," as one commenter put it. Check Point's alumni network, the "Check Point mafia," populated a large share of Israeli cybersecurity.
Some of that leakage was the inevitable cost of a dominant founder. Calcalist wrote that Zuk "recognized quite quickly that it would be difficult to flourish and develop next to a dominant figure like Shwed." A company built around one inventor's vision repels people with competing visions. Shwed's partial answer was internal "rockets," young businesses incubated inside Check Point, such as the Horizon managed service. "We are exploring," he told Ray. His fuller answer was acquisition: buying back the talent the culture could not hold.
The SofaWare litigation shows the darker version. When a partnership with outside founders soured, the result was twelve years of litigation, including an Israeli Supreme Court ruling. Alumni who leave on good terms come back as acquisitions. Partners who leave on bad terms come back as plaintiffs.
Tactic: Keep a running list of departed high performers and what they are building, and review it every quarter as a pipeline of future acquisitions, not a list of losses.
Principle 11
Read the outside critics as threat intelligence
Richard Stiennon's Network World open letter told Shwed to move the headquarters to America and to sell hardware appliances. Shwed rejected the first instruction entirely. He arrived at the second years later on his own terms, through the Nokia acquisition and a unified gateway architecture. Investors' long chorus for more aggressive growth went mostly unheeded for two decades, until Shwed conceded that "we could have grown more aggressively" and hired an outsider "who could lead real change."
The pattern is that of a careful analyst. He collected the data and drew his own conclusions, as Rothrock put it, and he acted when the evidence, not the volume, warranted it. Some critiques were wrong for Check Point. Relocation would have undercut the cost structure and the talent loyalty he valued. Others were simply early. The skill lies in sorting the two, the way a security analyst separates false positives from real intrusions.
The risk of this posture is latency. A slow, evidence-driven response to criticism is the same thing as missing a shift, if the shift moves faster than your evidence threshold. Cloud was that case.
Tactic: Keep a file of every serious public critique of your strategy, note the date, and revisit it after two years to see which "false positives" turned out to be real.
Principle 12
Step down at the peak—and admit the peak was later than it should have been
Shwed timed his exit to strength: "The timing is perfect because we are on a positive trend, the results are excellent... We peaked on all levels, including the stock." He kept the executive chairmanship, framed the change as a return to strategic thinking ("you get very little time to think about the future of cyber"), and chose an outsider who was also the ultimate insider, the former commander of Unit 8200.
The more valuable lesson came sixteen months later, in a sentence few founders ever say in public: "I had several internal candidates and may regret not stepping aside earlier and letting one of them lead." Leaving at a peak is good practice. Admitting that an earlier peak existed, and was passed over, is rarer and more useful. It tells the organization that the founder is subject to the same evaluation as everyone else, which may be the single most important cultural signal in a succession.
G
Anatomy of a Thirty-Year Succession
Each phase of the handoff, as Shwed described it.
| Phase | What happened | Shwed, in his words |
|---|---|---|
| Pressure | About 28 years of being asked when he would leave | "Everybody's asking me that question, Why don't you retire?" |
| Announcement | February 6, 2024: transition announced at annual results | "We peaked on all levels, including the stock." |
| Selection | External choice: Nadav Zafrir, former 8200 commander and Team8 co-founder | "More of the same isn't enough, we all deserve innovation." |
| Reflection | June 2025, six months into the new CEO's tenure | "I may regret not stepping aside earlier." |
Tactic: Name two internal successors today and write down the conditions under which you would hand over to them. Revisit that document every year as if your tenure depended on it, because it does.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Gil Shwed, recalling Check Point's early years, to Tiernan Ray of The Technology LetterWe didn't even have a dialup connection to the Internet because it cost a thousand dollars a month and we didn't want to pay a thousand dollars. We actually did our testing on other companies' lines the first year or two.
— Gil Shwed, to CIO magazine, 2002We look at ourselves as a technology company, not as a military company or as an Israeli company.
— Gil Shwed, on cyber threats, Quora sessionWe simply need to have a vulnerable point. Yes, we are all targets.
— Gil Shwed, February 2024We delivered consistent results that were unparalleled, proving that Israeli companies can not only trade at a value of billions but also sell in billions. Of course, we could have grown more aggressively in marketing and sales.
— Gil Shwed, Calcalist Growth Conference, June 2025If you don't have optimism, you don't belong in business.
Maxims
- Write the rule before the threat. Defaults decided in calm conditions are the only decisions that hold under attack.
- Read the logs before blaming the code. When the alarm fires, check whether the system is broken or the world is hostile.
- Borrow the commodity, buy the entrance. Refuse to pay for what can be borrowed, and never haggle over what cannot.
- Simple mechanism, critical problem. A complex solution to a complex problem rarely survives contact with the market.
- No home market is an advantage. Building for customers six thousand miles away forces a product to be universal from the first line.
- Own enough to say no. Founder control is the only durable defense against being sold, and the only one that also blocks good advice.
- Margin is a moat in winter and a ceiling in summer. Know which season you are in.
- Whoever numbers the generations owns the story. Define your market's stages and place yourself at the newest one.
- Keep the company's politics out and the people's politics free. Neutrality protects the culture, though it never exempts the company from its choices.
- The best succession admits its own delay. Leaving at a peak is wise; saying you missed an earlier one is wiser.
