Part IThe Story
The Simulation That Wasn't
The laptop opened onto a web page that looked like almost nothing. At the top of the screen sat a single text field, which the people in the room would have called an edit control: an empty rectangle of the kind you find on a search engine, waiting for a question. The man at the keyboard was thirty-three or thirty-four, depending on the month. He clicked a bookmark and began to type in something close to plain English. Show computers where CPU > 75%. A list of machines scrolled up the screen, fully populated, as if someone had spent the morning compiling the report and was only now handing it over. Show computers with a process named WINWORD.EXE. Another list. It took seconds. It did not take hours, and it did not take the days that everyone watching knew it should take.
The audience was Andreessen Horowitz, and it was about as hard a room as enterprise software offered in 2014. Several of the firm's people had built Opsware, the data-center automation company that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had steered through the dot-com wreckage. Steven Sinofsky, then an adviser to the firm, had spent his career at Microsoft running products deployed on hundreds of millions of the endpoints in question. In a blog post titled "Tanium Magic," published June 22, 2014, Sinofsky called the room "an informed, and perhaps tough, audience." They knew the state of the art in endpoint telemetry about as well as anyone. The benchmark they were holding up against the demo, Sinofsky wrote, was a product called BigFix, which "represented the state of the art," and on BigFix basic management queries across a large network could take days.
So the room did the rational thing and disbelieved what it saw. "At this point we reached the only reasonable conclusion," Sinofsky wrote. "Orion was showing us a simulation of the product they hoped to build."
He wasn't.
The man at the keyboard was Orion Hindawi, and the detail that makes the scene more than a good Silicon Valley anecdote is this: the product the experts were using to measure his impossible demo had been built by Orion Hindawi too. BigFix was his father's company. Orion had started writing scripts for it after high school let out, had stopped attending classes at Berkeley to rebuild it, and had run its technology department at twenty-two. The state of the art that made his new product look like a forgery was his own earlier work and his father's. To impress the room he first had to discredit his inheritance, and he did it in a few seconds of typing into a box.
The firm invested $90 million that year, then the largest single bet in its history. Sinofsky, who had pushed the investment, kept using the word magic. Orion has generally avoided it. For most of the twelve years since, he has argued in podcasts, op-eds, cable segments, and blog posts that the thing his software does is the least magical thing in computing: it tells a company how many computers it owns.
This turns out to be a question most large companies cannot answer. That fact, and a father and son who spent four decades and three companies trying to answer it, is where nearly everything else in this story starts.
By the Numbers
The Hindawi Ledger
$400MIBM's price for BigFix, the father-son company Tanium was built to obsolete (2010)
10,000xSpeed improvement over the state of the art Orion said Tanium needed to deliver
$142MAndreessen Horowitz's combined investment by March 2015, the firm's largest single bet to date
$300MCash in the bank in November 2015, which Orion said was untouched
125 → 340Employees from the start of 2015 to February 2016
36MEndpoints Tanium reports managing globally (2026)
40%Share of the Fortune 100 relying on Tanium at Orion's return as CEO
Of Hind, by Way of Baghdad
The surname is a map. In Arabic, Hindawi means something of or from Hind, the old name for India. The Wikipedia entries for the family list ancestry that is Iraqi-Jewish with Indian-Jewish roots behind it, which makes the name an accurate record of a route: India to Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia to the Levant, the Levant to a hillside campus on San Francisco Bay. Search the name today and the results are mostly an open-access academic publisher, a pair of twentieth-century Arab poets, and, a few entries down, a Jordanian convicted in the 1980s of plotting to bomb an airliner. The name has a lot of geography in it, and the people who carry it have scattered.
David Hindawi was born in Baghdad on December 8, 1944, into a Jewish community that had lived in Mesopotamia since before the Babylonian Talmud was written and would be almost entirely gone within a decade. In 1951, when he was six, his family went to Israel. He studied industrial and management engineering at the Technion in Haifa, earning both a bachelor's and a master's, and then served in the Israeli Air Force's Operations Research department. Operations research is the discipline of making complex systems behave: queues, routing, the movement of scarce things through networks under pressure. In 1970 he immigrated to the United States and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in the same field. He would not leave Berkeley, in the sense that matters, for the next fifty years.
He named his son after a constellation.
Orion Hindawi was born in Berkeley in 1980 and raised there. In 1984, when the boy was four, David founded Software Ventures, a telecommunications software company. Years later his son described its products, with evident affection, as "some of the first software that managed modems — not many people know what those even are any more." The company was sold to an internet service provider in 1995. Its founder's specialty was already clear: not the glamorous application on the screen but the plumbing that lets one machine reach another.
Orion grew up inside that plumbing. "At age 3, I was allowed to play with brand new computers," he wrote in a 2015 blog post, "which at the time should have been kept far away from my destructive little hands. Rumor has it I loved destroying technology before I loved using it." He credits Berkeley's schools, and in particular elementary science teachers who in the 1980s were already "showing us how computers could help simplify problems," for a boyhood spent trying to learn physics from math libraries "when most kids had no access to a computer at all." It reads like a standard origin story for a technologist, but the details are specific to one city. A Baghdad-born operations researcher with a Technion degree and a Berkeley doctorate raised a son in a university town full of machines, and the son's first instinct with a machine was to take it apart.
Other people's fathers came home with a different kind of frustration, and Orion noticed. As a boy he visited friends' houses at the end of the workday, when their parents came in tired and annoyed, usually, he recalled to Entrepreneur in 2015, because "their boss didn't let them do something, or the organizational structure resisted change." His father's frustrations had a different source. "It was never over someone stopping him internally," Orion said, "but about 'I want to push against the boundaries of the world.' That appealed to me."
As the son tells it, his father never had a boss to resent. The only things in his way were the world's limits. A child raised that way can come to think that obstacles inside an organization are a failure of nerve, and that the only resistance worth respecting is physics. That belief would help Orion build a very good company, and it would also nearly break that company in 2017.
The Only School in Town
In 1997 David Hindawi founded BigFix, his second company. Orion was seventeen and still in high school. On a 2017 episode of The Sunday Times's tech podcast, the host's timestamped episode notes describe him "starting his first company at age 17," which is a generous way of saying he showed up at his father's office after school and wrote scripts.
The scripts became more. At Berkeley, his involvement grew until it pushed out everything else. As a sophomore, he later said, he was working "70 to 80 hours a week" rewriting BigFix's software so the company could pivot from a consumer product to an enterprise one, a change that decided the business's future. The coursework could not compete. He stopped going to class. Forbes would later report that he left the university before graduating. The Tanium biography puts it more delicately: he "attended" Berkeley.
He has never presented this as a sacrifice. "There's just no school that teaches this," he told Entrepreneur. "Today there are incubators … but the only real way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to learn in the trenches. And I had this amazing school I was allowed to go to: my dad and his company. Not many people have that luxury." Read closely, the quote is mostly an acknowledgment of privilege, from a man who would later begin his own Fortune "40 Under 40" acceptance post by calling himself "simply the product of incredibly fortunate circumstances." It is also, very plainly, an account of a curriculum taught by one instructor.
The instructor treated it as one. At twenty-two, an age when his former classmates were graduating, Orion was put in charge of BigFix's fifteen-person technology department. The company was selling its enterprise product to the largest firms on Wall Street: Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs. Read today, the client list is a reminder of what happened to two of them. David took his son to the sales meetings in New York, briefed him on technique and strategy before each one, and afterward went over the meeting "point by point."
— David Hindawi, to Entrepreneur, 2015I told him, "I'm going to teach you everything I know about development, sales and running a company. I want you to be better than I ever was."
Most fathers don't say that to a son who has just dropped out of college. Even fewer then hand that son a seat at the table across from Morgan Stanley's engineers. "By the time he was 25-years-old," David recalled, "I felt comfortable walking into a meeting with Morgan Stanley with 20 engineers, including some of their top IT people, sitting around a table, and have him run the whole meeting."
The debriefs mattered as much as the meetings. The method was military, or operations research, or both: run the engagement, then take it apart afterward to find where the system lost efficiency. The son absorbed the method and also the hard edges that come with it. A man who spent his twenties being critiqued point by point by the person he most admired will expect that kind of critique from others and will give it freely. For a long time that looked like an asset. People later called it something else.
BigFix itself, by the account of the man who would become its most important outside admirer, was "a remarkable product for the time, routinely scaling to 100,000 end-points." It went out to an enterprise network, gathered configuration data from every PC and server it could reach, and pushed patches back. It was good, and it was slow. By the mid-2000s, the father and son, along with the core of the engineering team they had built together, had concluded that the gap between how fast BigFix answered a question and how fast a company under attack needed the answer could not be closed by improving BigFix.
Leaving and Beginning Again
The Sunday Times episode notes list one segment, at the 11:10 mark, as "leaving and beginning again." Few founders would describe it that plainly.
Both Hindawis left BigFix before the IBM acquisition. Fortune reported in 2015 that in 2007 Orion pitched the idea for a new company to his father. Given who had pitched whom for the previous decade, the reversal seems to have registered with both of them. Tanium was incorporated on July 16, 2007. Three years and four days later, on July 20, 2010, IBM closed its purchase of BigFix for a reported $400 million and folded it into its Tivoli software portfolio. The company the Hindawis had spent thirteen years building became a line item at the largest enterprise vendor in the world while they sat a few miles away building its replacement.
The replacement started with a number. "We recognized that enterprises needed endpoint control that was much faster than they could get with existing tools, and challenged ourselves to leapfrog the state of the art, including BigFix, where basic management queries could take days," Orion told Sinofsky. Then he gave the figure, which only makes sense if you take it literally:
— Orion Hindawi, quoted by Steven Sinofsky in 'Tanium Magic,' June 2014We knew that nothing short of a 10,000 times speed improvement over the state of the art at the time would solve the problem, and we needed to fundamentally change the paradigm of systems management and end-point security to accomplish that.
A ten-thousandfold improvement isn't something you get by optimizing. It turns a query that took a weekend into one that takes about fifteen seconds. "15-second visibility" was the phrase Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity used when it invited both Hindawis to speak in 2016. Nobody tunes their way to that kind of result. You have to change the shape of the system.
The shape they abandoned was hub-and-spoke, the architecture behind nearly every enterprise management and security product of the era, including those of the big incumbents, Symantec and Intel's McAfee. In that model a central server talks directly to each endpoint, which means the vendor and the customer have to invest heavily in data-center capacity to absorb thousands of simultaneous conversations. "People have optimized hub and spoke as much as they possibly can and it's a known problem," Orion said at an Andreessen Horowitz event in September 2015. "We realized that we had to change that topology so profoundly that basically, every problem that had to be solved in the hub and spoke had to be resolved in a different way."
What they built in its place is usually described as linear peer-to-peer. In an a16z podcast in June 2014, Orion and Sinofsky called it "linear peer-to-peer communications." Each computer on the network talks to the computer next to it. Data is pooled and passed along the chain, machine to machine, until it reaches a single server at the end. The intelligence is spread across the endpoints, and the center does very little work. Answering a question across a large network becomes something like passing a note down a long row of desks: each desk adds what it knows and hands the note on.
Nobody involved has said so, but the architecture is a fair description of how the Hindawis themselves had worked. A Baghdad childhood passed on to a Berkeley one. Techniques from Wall Street sales meetings handed from one generation to the next, point by point. The BigFix engineers came along as well. The team that built Tanium was, in Sinofsky's account, "mostly members of the original BigFix engineering group and all experts with years of experience in large enterprise management." Knowledge moved to the person next to you, not through a central authority.
They worked on it for a long time without showing it to anyone. The team spent "almost two years" in its Berkeley offices, Sinofsky wrote, "before the first customers saw the early results of their new product." The company took no venture capital until 2014, seven years after its founding. Contrary Research attributes this to "initial skepticism toward venture capital, stemming from earlier fundraising experiences at BigFix." No source I have found explains exactly what happened in those earlier experiences, but the conclusion the Hindawis drew is evident. They had already built a company once, on someone else's money and timeline. This time the work would be done before anyone else was allowed in the room.
Orion summarized the result in a 2016 conversation with Ben Horowitz as "a five-year company journey to perfect their platform." In 2014 he walked into the hardest room on Sand Hill Road, opened a laptop, and typed a question.
How Many Computers Do You Own?
The cybersecurity industry Tanium entered in the early 2010s sold fear in cinematic terms. The threats were nation-states, advanced persistent attackers, hackers attributed to specific buildings in specific foreign cities. Vendors produced forensic reports that read like spy novels. As Andreessen Horowitz put it in its notes on a January 2016 podcast with Orion and Ben Horowitz, enterprise security "reads like a Hollywood thriller."
Orion's commercial strategy rested on telling customers that the thriller was mostly irrelevant to them.
"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 told Fortune in 2015, a direct dig at the specialties of his better-known competitors. "Our industry at the end of the day needs to be more honest with our customers." A year later, on CNBC in October 2016, a week after the White House publicly blamed Russia for hacks meant to interfere with the presidential election and a few weeks after Yahoo disclosed a breach of 500 million accounts, he was asked about the escalating danger and declined to agree with the premise. "This is not a different type of attacker," he said. "It's the same type of stuff we've been seeing for 20 years, just more of it." Most of the attacks hitting Tanium's customers, he said, were "prosaic." Then he went further: "Our industry has really failed our market. We have, as an industry, been distracting people and have them focus on advanced threat and nation-states."
He has repeated the same argument for years, and it boils down to one unglamorous word. "There's this misconception that we can't defend against these attacks because we can't deal with the sophistication of the attackers," he said on an a16z podcast in May 2015. "In turns out, we should just be doing the good hygiene we've all been trying to do for the last 20 years." In an August 2016 op-ed for The Hill, written in response to a new presidential directive on cyber incident response, he defined the word precisely: "To us, 'hygiene' is the basics: knowing how many machines you have on a network and then ensuring all of their patches are up-to-date and are running the appropriate software."
The same op-ed contains the observation that best explains why the basics are so hard: "Paradoxically, the more critical the system, the more likely it's not being patched and updated, perhaps because it seems too central to business to risk the perceived negative impact of patching and updating." The most important machines are the ones nobody dares to touch, and so they are the most exposed. No sophisticated adversary is needed to take advantage of that. A company's own caution does the work.
The blog post titles from those years read like headlines from someone who didn't want to be invited back to the trade association's holiday party. "You're Going to Get Hacked. And Anti-Virus Won't Save You," from August 23, 2016, begins: "The security industry is failing. Not failing to make money, of course." On the Sunday Times podcast in November 2017 the host titled the episode with Orion's own phrase: "This is a snake-oil industry." The episode notes list a segment called "the great anti-virus scam" and another on the industry's "boy who cried wolf" problem.
This should be read with some skepticism, and Orion's critics have offered plenty. A vendor that tells you your real problem is the one its product solves is still selling something. Calling the competition's pitch snake oil is a very effective pitch. The hygiene argument was honest, and it was also good marketing, and nobody at Tanium appeared confused about which. In the 2016 conversation with Horowitz, Orion offered a line that works as both a claim and a closing argument: "Out of the top 10 breaches that happened in the last year, we've been bought by eight of them, and we're in procurement with the other two."
The phrase a16z used to summarize Tanium's approach, "block and tackle — not cloak and dagger," came from his investors, but Orion supplied the tone. Asked what would actually protect a company, he said the dull thing — keep the doors locked and know where the windows are — and then, unlike most people who say the dull thing, insisted on it: "It is the thing that will fix you."
The question he kept returning to, on stage and in print, was nearly childlike: How many computers do you have? A boy who liked to take machines apart grew up to build a billion-dollar company on the premise that the most powerful organizations in the world did not know what was inside their own walls.
Three Hundred Million Dollars, Untouched
In November 2015, Arik Hesseldahl of Re/code asked Orion what Tanium was doing with the more than $260 million it had raised. The answer was so unusual for that period in Silicon Valley that it read like a provocation.
"We raised from Andreessen twice, and then we thought we were going to stop there," Orion said. "We have not touched any of the money we raised. We have $300 million in the bank and that's growing from free cash flow." The company was not profitable on a GAAP basis, he explained, only "because we're trying to smooth out the revenue curve by deferring revenue intentionally."
The sequence of the money matters. Andreessen Horowitz put in $90 million in 2014 and another $52 million in March 2015, a combined $142 million that made Tanium the firm's single largest investment. That September, Tanium took $120 million from TPG, T. Rowe Price, and Institutional Venture Partners, followed shortly by another $30 million, at a valuation reported at $3.5 billion. On paper this looked like the usual escalation of a hot startup. Orion described it as something else: the money was sitting in the bank, and what the company had actually bought was a set of opinions.
"When T. Rowe, TPG and IVP came in, it was because we wanted more voices in the room and we didn't want a monoculture of viewpoints that tends to take hold at Silicon Valley companies," he told Re/code. "My friends warned me that they're 'New York financial guys,' and that was exactly what I wanted: Someone who will give me a deliberate perspective that is based on numbers and not based on us feeling good about ourselves."
The same interview contains the most-quoted tirade of his public life. "We've got companies in Silicon Valley that are building replicas of the Oval Office and paying $6 a bottle to give their employees pink coconut water because they're so high on themselves that they can't imagine ever failing." Then he got specific, which is when his anger tends to be most precise. "I was talking to one guy whose company has $8 million in annual revenue, and he's spending $600,000 a year on a NetJets account flying himself around on private jets. … That guy should be laughed out of every room he walks into, and yet he's getting kudos and pats on" — and the transcript ends there, as if the interviewer had heard enough.
The view was consistent. In his 2015 "40 Under 40" post, he said his father had taught him that "people are the true assets of great companies," and then dismissed the standard Valley way of acting on that belief: "In our industry, many people have tried to do this the easy way, which is throwing massages, nap pods and ping pong tables at them, but truly happy people have a mission they care about, and feel important, fulfilled and treated with respect." He had grown up in his father's company during the first dot-com crash, which Contrary Research notes BigFix had to survive, and he seems to regard extravagance the way a sailor regards an unsecured hatch.
What he wanted to spend on instead was liquidity. Tanium let employees sell shares in March 2015, as part of a $64 million investment. In May 2017 it ran a $100 million round in which no new money went to the company: $50 million bought employee stock, and $50 million bought shares from David Hindawi. "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," Orion told Business Insider. Because investors were buying common stock, not preferred, "it does not change the founders' ironclad grip on the company," the magazine reported, a point he made without apology. In 2018 the company raised two more nine-figure rounds, including $175 million from TPG Growth on May 3. By October, Forbes reported, Tanium had raised $800 million at a $6.5 billion valuation. "They're all for secondary," Orion told CRN at the company's 2019 Converge conference in Nashville. "We have used them to buy back employee stock and early investor stock."
The IPO itself kept receding. In February 2016 he said Tanium would go public "at some point because it's fair for our employees and our investors," and added a characteristically dry dismissal: "I've heard lots of reasons to go IPO, most of which don't make any sense to me. Liquidity to our investors and employees does make sense." In October 2016 he told CNBC the company planned to go public "within 18 months." By 2019 the tone had changed.
"It does not look fun to be a public company today," he told CRN. "There's a mythology that being public is the measure of success, and that's been pervasive in the industry for the last 30-40 years. But the reality of the situation is that public companies often end up making bad decisions to service a short-term shareholder." He had heard the same from peers, he said, "over a dinner table that this is just not soul-nourishing for them at all." Then, without seeming to notice, he described his liquidity strategy in nearly the same words he had used two years earlier: "I like it that people can buy the house they want, they can send their kids to the school they want, they can buy the car they want, and that we as a company don't have to take on huge pain to make that happen."
He kept coming back to houses and schools. As of 2026 Tanium is still private, valued at around $9 billion. The founders' grip, in Business Insider's word "ironclad," has never been loosened by the public market, because it has never been tested there.
Two Titles, One Decision
In the fall of 2015, Entrepreneur published a profile of the Hindawis under the headline "All in the Family." It gave their ages and titles as if introducing a law firm: David, seventy, CEO and chairman; Orion, thirty-five, president and chief technology officer. "As they tell it, they are true co-leaders," the writer reported. "Every major company decision is a joint one." Then she added, with an editorial wince: "For those whose relationship with their parents is even the slightest bit fraught, this sounds like an exhausting and unwise exercise. For David and Orion, nothing else makes sense."
Four months later, on February 22, 2016, the titles changed and, the Hindawis insisted, nothing else did. Orion became CEO and David became executive chairman. The announcement on the company blog explained the move in board-building terms: "Given our rapid global growth, we now recognize that we need to focus on building a world-class board, which requires that David spend more time on that aspect of leadership than he has in the past. That's why, effective immediately, I will take on the role of CEO, while David becomes Executive Chairman. This shift is a realignment to allow us to stay nimble as we grow."
The next line is the one worth noticing. "From the first day that David and I founded this company, we have shared decision-making equally. That arrangement has proven — and will continue — to be an excellent one for Tanium."
Fortune led its story with "Like father, like son," which missed the point. A title, in this arrangement, was an assignment: who handles the board, who handles the customers, who signs which letters. The decisions stayed joint. The company had grown from 125 employees at the start of 2015 to 340, had hired executives away from rivals including FireEye, had grown sales more than 200 percent in the previous fiscal year, and had closed more deals in the fourth quarter of 2015 than in all of 2014. It was cash-flow positive and debt-free. Nothing in those numbers required a change of command, which suggests the change of command wasn't one.
Five weeks after the switch, on March 28, 2016, at 4 p.m., both men sat down in Room 205 of South Hall on the Berkeley campus for a discussion billed as "Cybersecurity and the Future of Industry: A Case Study of Tanium." The setting was close to too neat: the university where the father earned his doctorate and the son stopped attending class, with the company itself now presented as course material. The Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity's announcement noted that Tanium's platform was "used by more than half of Fortune 100 companies."
The board-building did happen. On February 22, 2017, one year after the transition, Orion announced that Maggie Wilderotter and Anthony Belfiore were joining the board. "We're entering our tenth year as a company," he wrote. Wilderotter, the former Frontier Communications chief executive, was still on the board in 2026, alongside TPG's Tim Millikin, the former Ford chief executive Mark Fields, and Bina Chaurasia, whose own path into that room comes up below.
The shared-decision model extended past the family. In June 2019, Fazal Merchant, the former DreamWorks CFO who had joined in 2017 as COO and CFO, was named co-CEO alongside Orion. Asked by CRN why more companies didn't try the arrangement, Orion said ego was the main obstacle. He had grown up working within a two-person partnership, and to him splitting the top job seemed less strange than the alternative.
David's influence came through less as authority than as a short list of rules, and Orion published them in 2015 almost as if reading from scripture. "Right and wrong is more important than what you want." "Never give up." "If this were easy, everyone would succeed, and in fact very few will succeed, and the big difference is tenacity." He also had a line about recognition that is self-deprecating and a little sly: "Because there isn't a 40 under 500, I am here representing each and every one of them."
That "40 under 500" is the clearest statement of the arrangement in the public record: one man in his thirties standing in for a company of veterans, his father first among them.
Great Things Are Not Cuddly
On April 11, 2017, Orion published a cheerful blog post welcoming Fazal Merchant as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. "From our first conversation, it was clear to us that Fazal was the right fit for Tanium." Two days later the company's reputation started to give way.
On April 13, Bloomberg published a story by Lizette Chapman and Sarah McBride under the headline "Tanium's Family Empire Is in Crisis." It described an executive exodus and quoted employees who said the CEO humiliated people in front of colleagues and fired them shortly before their stock options vested. The company denied the allegations. Business Insider ran its own version that week: "Security Startup Tanium Has Been Accused of Having a Horrible Culture."
The second story was worse. Rolfe Winkler of The Wall Street Journal reported that from 2010 to 2015, Orion had used the live network of El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California, in product demonstrations for prospective customers. A Tanium partner had installed the software at the hospital. Videos of the demos had been posted on YouTube and were reportedly taken down after the Journal began asking about them. The hospital said: "El Camino Hospital was not aware of this usage and never authorized Tanium to use hospital material in any sales material or presentation." It added that Tanium "never had access to patient information and, based on our review to date, patient information remains secure," and noted, pointedly, that Tanium was a "former third-party vendor."
Julie Bort of Business Insider offered an analogy that circulated widely: "It's a little like discovering your building doorman had been bringing strangers into your apartment to prove that he's capable of guarding an apartment building."
The analogy hurt because it got the structural irony right. Tanium's whole pitch was its demo. The software's value was that it worked on real networks, live, in seconds, at a scale that made experienced investors assume they were watching a simulation. A demo of real-time visibility only persuades if it is real, and something real has to belong to somebody. A company that had built its reputation on making the invisible visible had shown strangers the inside of a hospital without, according to the hospital, asking.
Orion answered on April 19 with an open letter to customers. It is the most revealing document he has published, in part because it doesn't do what crisis letters usually do. It opens with weary candor: "I can imagine that many of you are getting tired of waking up to the bad Tanium press stories hitting your inbox in the last week." It acknowledges the demo problem without accepting the framing: since 2015, the company had required written agreements before demoing from any customer's environment, and "we take responsibility for mistakes in the use of this particular customer's demo environment. We should have done better anonymizing that customer's data." Then it does something unusual. It sorts the accusations into true and false.
"It is true that I personally can be hard-edged, and that I've had to apologize to people at Tanium when I've gotten too sharp at times," he wrote. "It is true that we fire people when they don't meet our ethical or performance standards." It is true, he went on, that the company had not "matured processes in some areas as quickly as we've added people." He then turned to the charge he would not accept:
— Orion Hindawi, 'An Open Letter From Tanium's CEO to Our Customers,' April 19, 2017What is not true is that we have a toxic culture. Mission-oriented, hard-charging, disciplined, even intense, but not toxic.
The argument he made for that distinction was about retention, and it pointed back to his father. "David and I are proud that many of the best people we worked with at BigFix chose to come work with us at Tanium," he wrote. "I hope that I get to continue working with many of the people at Tanium for the rest of my career. That doesn't happen if we're stingy or cruel." The proof he offered was the team that had followed them from the first company to the second, the people passed along the chain.
A month later, announcing the $100 million secondary round, he spoke more bluntly. "Great things are not cuddly," he told Business Insider. The work of security was a "demanding, stressful thing," and he would not pamper anyone. The same round paid out $50 million to employees and $50 million to his father. Read one way, the timing offered a way out to anyone who disagreed with how the Hindawis ran the company. Read another way, it was evidence for his claim that he was neither stingy nor cruel. Probably it was both.
Some of the record is still unclear. On the Sunday Times podcast that November, one segment, at the 19:20 mark, is listed as "on whether Tanium has a toxic culture and 'Orion's list.'" The public record doesn't say what was on Orion's list. The name hangs in the episode notes, next to a timestamp.
What followed is better documented. In August 2017 Tanium hired Bina Chaurasia as its first chief people officer; she later joined the board. A year after the crisis, the journalist Marc Ambasna-Jones met Orion in the Cabinet dining room deep inside the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C., and found a man with "a calm, workmanlike manner. He's not a salesman. He's an engineer first." Orion told him the employees "didn't recognize themselves in the articles," but that the episode had pushed the company into "putting in as many belts and suspenders to make sure that what was said was never actually going to be true about Tanium."
"Belts and suspenders" is the kind of phrase a systems engineer uses: redundancy, failover, a second mechanism in case the first one fails. Faced with a story about his own temper, he answered with an architecture.
The Hub Reasserts Itself
From the outside, the years that followed looked like steady success. Revenue reached $440.2 million in 2019. In June 2020 Salesforce invested at a valuation CNBC reported as $9 billion, and later reporting put Tanium at $10 billion that year. In August 2020 Orion announced a partnership with Google Cloud, writing that the pandemic had left IT and security teams with a two-sided problem: "transitioning employees to remote work without compromising availability or security, and also defending against the increase in cyberattacks as threat actors continue to exploit the chaos." A partnership with Microsoft followed. In a video with Microsoft's corporate vice president Ann Johnson he presented the two companies as complementary, which was diplomatic given that in 2019 he had told CRN that Microsoft's management platform was the competitor Tanium "most frequently finds itself competing and winning against."
Inside, the top of the company was unsettled again. Between 2020 and 2021, according to Contrary Research, Tanium lost a series of senior executives: co-CEO Fazal Merchant, CFO Jim Jackson, CMO Chris Pick, and others. The co-CEO arrangement that Orion had defended against the charge of ego lasted about two years. Contrary reports that Orion "acknowledged internal leadership challenges and used the moment to reset company culture and strategy." The record doesn't preserve exactly what he said.
In those years the voice of the open letter was still there, now aimed outward. On March 3, 2021, he published "It's Time to Stop Settling for Bad Data," arguing that IT teams had built data infrastructure for everyone else while neglecting their own. On December 17, 2021, as the Log4j vulnerability spread through enterprise software around the world, he wrote a letter addressed not to IT departments but to chief executives, one CEO speaking to others, which skipped the people who would actually do the patching and spoke to the people who would answer for it.
The company also moved. Its headquarters went to Kirkland, Washington, on the east side of Lake Washington, though the operations center stayed in Emeryville, a few miles from where the first prototype was built. The public records list David Hindawi's residence variously as Seattle and Berkeley, which may simply describe a man who now lives in two places.
On February 1, 2023, the family stepped back from day-to-day control. Dan Streetman became chief executive. Orion became executive chairman and David became chairman emeritus. That year Tanium launched a product for what the industry calls digital employee experience, with self-help and automated remediation features. It was the sort of product a company releases when it is maturing, sold to the people who keep the machines running, not the people who hunt attackers.
For the first time since 1997, when a seventeen-year-old began writing scripts after school, neither Hindawi was running the company they had built. In the terms of their own architecture, the founders had moved to the end of the chain: still connected and still passing information along, but no longer at the center.
The public record of Streetman's three years is thin and mostly flattering, written as it was by press release. By the company's later account, he "scaled its go-to-market operations and secured strong industry analyst recognition." The analyst recognition was real. In 2026 Gartner named Tanium a Leader in its inaugural Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Management Tools, and in July Gartner's Peer Insights named it a Customers' Choice. NATO added Tanium to its Information Assurance Product Catalogue in May. In April the company hired Carol MacKinlay as chief people officer. In July it raised another $100 million.
In June 2026, Insider reported that the company had gone through a leadership shake-up after losing five top executives. By then it was hard to call it a new pattern.
More Soon
The press release went out from Emeryville on August 20, 2026. "Tanium, a leader in Autonomous IT, today announced that Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Orion Hindawi has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately." Dan Streetman was leaving as CEO and as a board member after three years. "Co-founder David Hindawi will return to the role of Chairman of the Board."
He would return, at eighty-one, to the title he had held when his son first became chief executive a decade earlier. Viewed from far enough away, the 2023 restructuring now looks less like a succession than an intermission.
The language of the announcement was gracious about the man leaving. "Dan led Tanium with integrity, steadiness and genuine care for this company, its customers, and its people," Orion said. Streetman, also gracious, said he "could not be more grateful to Orion, David and the Tanium Board for the trust they placed in me to lead this special company." The order of names, Orion first and David second, says something about who now speaks first, and something about who still has to be thanked.
The rationale was the same argument Orion had been making since 2007, updated for new conditions. "AI has made what we do more critical than ever," he said in the release, "and Tanium is the platform every organization will rely on as threats grow more sophisticated, and the pace of change intensifies." The new product was called Atlas, described as an "autonomous operating system" that "puts the full depth of the Tanium Autonomous IT Platform behind every IT and security operator — human and agentic." Orion pointed out that Atlas had been "developed and released in a fraction of the time that would previously have been required."
The company's own LinkedIn announcement restated the founding mission in a single sentence: "give organizations a single source of truth across their entire endpoint estate, in real time, at scale. That mission hasn't changed – the stakes have." It said the platform was now relied on by 40 percent of the Fortune 100. Other accounts put its reach at roughly 36 million endpoints. Within a month Tanium had joined Project Glasswing, Anthropic's effort to use frontier AI models to find and fix software vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them. The company that built its reputation on telling customers the threats were mundane was now preparing for adversaries, and defenders, that were not human.
Orion's own post, on LinkedIn, was shorter and more personal than the press release, and it read like the version without the lawyers. "Some news: I've returned to Tanium as CEO." He thanked Streetman. Then he wrote:
"I co-founded Tanium because endpoint management and security were broken, and I'm back because the next version of that problem is here. AI agents are going to do work that IT and security teams have to do by hand today. Atlas is how Tanium does that for our customers, and it's the most important thing we've ever built."
And near the end: "The best part of this job is being in the room with you, and I plan to be there a lot."
More than a thousand people reacted. One commenter wished him well in "authoring the next leather-bound volume of Tanium's epic journey," a phrase that would probably have made the man who once mocked pink coconut water wince. Another, a security veteran who listed his certifications after his name, wrote: "Rip it up Orion. Folks in the industry got all lazy and stuff. Wake them up." That was closer to the house style.
The post ended with two words: "More soon."
For twelve years the scene in the a16z conference room has been told as a story about speed, ten thousand times faster, seconds instead of days. Its more lasting detail may be the screen itself: a single edit control at the top of a web page, the kind of box you'd find on a search engine, waiting for someone to type a question. In 2014 the person typing was a thirty-four-year-old engineer who had learned his craft in sales meetings his father critiqued point by point. Show computers where CPU > 75%. By Orion's own account, in 2026 the questions will increasingly be typed by agents, millions of them, asking the same thing he had been asking since he was a boy taking apart his father's machines: what is in here, how many are there, and which ones are broken.
The box is still there, empty, with the cursor in it.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below are drawn from the record of Orion Hindawi's three decades in enterprise software: the apprenticeship at BigFix, the long silent build of Tanium, the capital strategy that kept the company private and the founders in control, the 2017 crisis, and the departure and return of the founder as CEO. They aren't offered as an endorsement of everything he did. Several are lessons learned the expensive way, and at least one is a warning. What they share is the habit that runs through his career: treat the organization, the market, and the problem itself as a system whose shape can be changed, not merely tuned.
The Hindawi Playbook
- 1.Make your own best work the competitor.
- 2.Change the topology, not the tuning.
- 3.Sell the boring truth.
- 4.Finish before you show.
- 5.Raise capital for the voices, not the cash.
- 6.Make liquidity a management tool.
- 7.Spend as if the downturn has already arrived.
- 8.Apprentice in the room, then debrief point by point.
- 9.Divide titles, not decisions.
- 10.Concede the true charges precisely to refute the false ones.
- 11.Treat your demo as your ethics on display.
- 12.Hold the CEO seat as a returnable post.
Principle 1
Make your own best work the competitor
When Tanium was founded in 2007, the benchmark it had to beat was not Symantec or McAfee. It was BigFix, the company the Hindawis had spent a decade building and that IBM would buy for $400 million three years later. Orion's founding statement says so directly: "challenged ourselves to leapfrog the state of the art, including BigFix, where basic management queries could take days." Most founders take on a second company to escape the limits of someone else's product. The Hindawis set out to escape the limits of their own.
That choice has two advantages. You know your own product's weaknesses better than any outsider, so the target is precise. And you are free of the most common failure of experienced founders, which is defending the architecture that made them successful. When a16z's partners assumed the Tanium demo was a simulation, it was because they measured it against BigFix. The father and son who built BigFix had already concluded it wasn't good enough.
Tactic: Write down the three things your current or previous product can't do because of how it was built, and judge any new venture by whether it removes those limits instead of working around them.
Principle 2
Change the topology, not the tuning
"People have optimized hub and spoke as much as they possibly can and it's a known problem." That sentence holds the strategic core of Tanium. The incumbent architecture had been tuned for decades, and further tuning would yield small gains. Orion set a target, 10,000 times faster, that ruled out tuning entirely. A goal that large forces a structural answer: endpoints that talk to the machine next to them, pool data, and relay it down a chain, with little left for the center to do.
Choosing an absurd number was the strategy. A 2x goal invites a better hub. A 10,000x goal requires removing the hub. The "linear peer-to-peer" architecture wasn't a feature. It was a different shape for the network, and as Orion said, "every problem that had to be solved in the hub and spoke had to be resolved in a different way." That is expensive, and it is why the company spent roughly two years building before customers saw anything. It is also why the result was defensible for more than a decade.
Tactic: Set one goal so far beyond the current baseline that no amount of incremental improvement could reach it, and use it to identify which structural assumption has to go.
Principle 3
Sell the boring truth
In a market that sold fear, Orion sold hygiene. He told Fortune that customers should stop asking "which building in Shanghai a hacker came from." He told CNBC, a week after the White House blamed Russia for election hacking, that "this is not a different type of attacker." He called his own industry "snake-oil." He defined his product's job in the least exciting terms available: "knowing how many machines you have on a network and then ensuring all of their patches are up-to-date."
The contrarian position worked commercially because it was true and because it was verifiable. Any CIO could test it by asking their own team how many computers the company owned and how long the answer took. A message that reframes the buyer's problem so that your product is the obvious solution, and that the buyer can check in an afternoon, is stronger than one that inflates the threat. It also gave Tanium a moral position against its competitors, "our industry at the end of the day needs to be more honest with our customers," which turned a sales pitch into something closer to a cause.
◎
Two Ways to Sell Security
How Orion Hindawi positioned Tanium against the dominant industry narrative, in his own public framing.
| Industry narrative (as Hindawi characterized it) | Tanium's counter-position |
|---|---|
| The threat is nation-states and advanced attackers. | "It's the same type of stuff we've been seeing for 20 years, just more of it." |
| Attribute the attack: which building, which country. | Find out how the data left your insecure computers. |
| Anti-virus and point products will protect you. | "You're Going to Get Hacked. And Anti-Virus Won't Save You." |
| Sophistication beats defense. | "We should just be doing the good hygiene we've all been trying to do for the last 20 years." |
| Cloak and dagger. | Block and tackle. |
Tactic: Find the dull, checkable question your customer can't currently answer, and make your pitch the act of asking it in front of them.
Principle 4
Finish before you show
Tanium took no venture capital for seven years. Its team, made up largely of BigFix veterans, worked in Berkeley offices for almost two years before any customer saw a result. When Orion finally took the product to Andreessen Horowitz, it was finished enough that the most experienced audience in enterprise software thought it was fake.
The sequence matters. Showing a product early invites outside opinions about what it should become, and venture money comes with a timeline. By building in private and funding themselves, the Hindawis delivered something whose central claim, answers in seconds, could only be shown, not described. The demo did the persuading. It also set the terms: an investor who has just been shown something impossible is not in a position to negotiate hard.
Tactic: If your product's value lies in a capability nobody believes is possible, delay external exposure until you can demonstrate it live, because a working demo negotiates better than any pitch deck.
Principle 5
Raise capital for the voices, not the cash
In November 2015, Tanium had $300 million in the bank, untouched, and was growing it from free cash flow. Orion said the 2015 round with TPG, T. Rowe Price, and IVP was raised "because we wanted more voices in the room and we didn't want a monoculture of viewpoints that tends to take hold at Silicon Valley companies." When friends warned him the new investors were "New York financial guys," he said that was the point: "a deliberate perspective that is based on numbers and not based on us feeling good about ourselves."
That turns the usual logic of fundraising around. Most companies raise because they need money and accept whatever governance comes with it. Tanium raised from a position where it needed nothing, and so it could choose investors for the corrective they offered: public-market discipline set against Valley optimism. Raising this way also signals something to customers and employees. A company with untouched cash is not about to run out.
Tactic: When you raise from strength, select at least one investor whose worldview differs from your current cap table, and ask them explicitly to challenge your numbers.
Principle 6
Make liquidity a management tool
Tanium has delayed its IPO for at least a decade. In 2016 it was "at some point." Later in 2016 it was "within 18 months." By 2019 public life did "not look fun." What made the delay workable was a steady series of secondary transactions: $64 million in March 2015, $100 million in May 2017 ($50 million for employees, $50 million for David Hindawi), and two nine-figure rounds in 2018, all, in Orion's words, "for secondary."
Done this way, liquidity becomes a lever. Employees get the house, the car, the school tuition, the things Orion keeps naming, and the founders avoid quarterly earnings calls and the "short-term shareholder" he distrusts. Because buyers took common stock, founder control stayed "ironclad." The cost is real: secondary rounds get harder as the shareholder base grows, as Orion acknowledged, and a company that never goes public never gets a market's independent judgment of its value.
$
Capital Without Dilution of Control
Selected Tanium financing and liquidity events, categorized by purpose.
| Year | Event | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | $90M from Andreessen Horowitz | Validation |
| 2015 | $52M additional from a16z; $64M investment including employee secondary | Liquidity |
| 2015 | $120M from TPG, T. Rowe Price, IVP; cash held untouched | Voices |
| 2017 | $100M secondary: $50M employees, $50M David Hindawi | Liquidity |
| 2018 | Two nine-figure rounds incl. $175M from TPG Growth, "all for secondary" | Liquidity |
| 2016–2026 | Repeated IPO deferral | Risk |
Tactic: If you intend to stay private longer than your employees expected, build a regular secondary program before anyone has to ask for one.
Principle 7
Spend as if the downturn has already arrived
Orion's attack on pink coconut water, replica Oval Offices, and a founder with $8 million in revenue spending $600,000 a year on NetJets was not just a good quote. It reflected a view about what signals actually do inside a company. In his telling, perks are "the easy way" of looking after people, a stand-in for the harder work of giving them "a mission they care about," along with respect and a sense of importance.
That frugality had an economic purpose. It kept Tanium cash-flow positive and debt-free through a period of rapid hiring, which let the company raise from strength, avoid the public markets, and fund employee liquidity without new primary capital. Austerity and generosity fit together here: the money not spent on nap pods was money that could buy back employee stock. The open question, which the 2017 coverage raised directly, is whether austerity in perks shades into austerity in warmth. Orion's own letter conceded that drive "taken to an extreme" produces stress.
Tactic: Before approving any perk, ask whether the same dollars would serve employees better as equity liquidity, and say the trade-off out loud.
Principle 8
Apprentice in the room, then debrief point by point
Orion never finished college. He was trained in New York sales meetings with Lehman, Merrill, and Goldman, briefed beforehand by his father and taken through every point afterward. By twenty-two he ran a fifteen-person department. By twenty-five, his father trusted him to run a meeting with twenty Morgan Stanley engineers. "There's just no school that teaches this," he said. "The only real way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to learn in the trenches."
Two parts of the method matter: exposure to real stakes early, and structured critique after every engagement. Most companies give junior talent one without the other. They shield people from the highest-stakes rooms, or they put them in those rooms and never debrief. David Hindawi did both, every time, and said his goal plainly: "I want you to be better than I ever was."
Tactic: Bring your most promising junior person into your next high-stakes meeting, brief them on your strategy beforehand, and spend thirty minutes afterward going through what happened point by point.
Principle 9
Divide titles, not decisions
When Orion became CEO in February 2016, he said the change was a reassignment of work, not of authority: David would spend more time "building a world-class board." The governing rule stayed in place: "From the first day that David and I founded this company, we have shared decision-making equally." Later the same idea produced a co-CEO arrangement with Fazal Merchant, which Orion defended by saying ego was the main barrier to such models.
The useful point is that titles can describe tasks, who faces the board, who faces customers, without describing hierarchy. That lets leadership adjust to the company's needs without the drama of a succession. The record also shows the limit. Shared control between a father and son with decades of trust behind them lasted. Shared control with an outside co-CEO ended within about two years, during a wave of executive departures. Joint decision-making seems to depend on a depth of trust that can't be hired.
⇄
The Shape of Leadership at Tanium
Leadership configurations over two decades, as reported in company announcements and press coverage.
2007
David and Orion found Tanium; decisions shared equally from day one.
2015
David, 70, CEO and chairman; Orion, 35, president and CTO.
2016
Orion becomes CEO; David becomes executive chairman to focus on the board.
2017
Fazal Merchant joins as COO and CFO amid press crisis.
2019
Merchant named co-CEO alongside Orion.
2020–21
Senior departures including co-CEO, CFO, and CMO.
2023
Dan Streetman becomes CEO; Orion executive chairman; David chairman emeritus.
2026
Orion returns as CEO; David returns as chairman.
Tactic: If you split leadership, write down which decisions require both parties and which belong to each title, and review that list every year as the company changes.
Principle 10
Concede the true charges precisely to refute the false ones
The April 19, 2017 open letter is a lesson in managing credibility. It doesn't deny everything. It says what is true: "I personally can be hard-edged," "I've had to apologize to people," "we haven't matured processes in some areas as quickly as we've added people." It accepts responsibility for the El Camino demo: "We should have done better anonymizing that customer's data." Only after those concessions does it reject what it calls false: "What is not true is that we have a toxic culture."
The concessions are what make the denial believable. A reader who has just watched the CEO admit his own temper is more inclined to accept his line between "intense" and "toxic." The letter also goes to customers directly, because "it's not always effective to use the press directly to set facts straight," and so it skips the outlets that produced the coverage. In the following months he treated his culture as an engineering problem, adding "belts and suspenders," including the company's first chief people officer.
Tactic: In your next crisis response, list each accusation, sort it honestly into true, partly true, and false, and concede the first two categories explicitly before you contest the third.
Principle 11
Treat your demo as your ethics on display
This principle is a warning. Tanium's demo was what made the company. It persuaded a16z that the product couldn't be real. But a demo of live visibility needs a live environment, and from 2010 to 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal, that environment included El Camino Hospital's network, which the hospital said it never authorized for sales use. Tanium had put a written-consent policy in place in 2015. The demos happened before that.
The broader point is that for any company whose product touches customer data, the sales process is a security process. Bort's doorman comparison was devastating because it was accurate: the way you prove capability can contradict the very thing you sell. That gap is most dangerous for startups growing faster than their governance, which is exactly what Orion admitted in his own letter.
Tactic: Audit every live demo environment your sales team uses today, and require documented, current, written consent from the owner of any real-world data shown.
Principle 12
Hold the CEO seat as a returnable post
Orion took the CEO title in 2016, gave it to Dan Streetman in 2023, and took it back in August 2026. Each time, the explanation was the problem in front of the company, not tenure or personality. In 2016 the company needed a board, so David moved to the board. In 2023 it needed go-to-market scale and operating discipline, which the company credits Streetman with providing. In 2026 the problem was, in Orion's words, "the next version" of the original one: AI agents doing work that IT teams do by hand.
The model is unusual and carries risk. A founder who stays on as executive chairman can make the CEO role look provisional, and the record shows senior turnover at Tanium under several configurations. But the strategic logic holds: the founder steps back when the company's main need is operational, and steps in when it is technical, when the problem itself has changed shape. "I'm back," Orion wrote, "because the next version of that problem is here."
Tactic: Define, in writing, the specific technical or strategic conditions under which a founder would return to the CEO role, so a return reads as an answer to a problem rather than a correction of a person.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Orion Hindawi, to Fortune, 2015Instead of figuring out which building in Shanghai a hacker came from, figure out how that hacker got data out of your insecure computers. Our industry at the end of the day needs to be more honest with our customers.
— Orion Hindawi, to Re/code, November 2015My friends warned me that they're "New York financial guys," and that was exactly what I wanted: Someone who will give me a deliberate perspective that is based on numbers and not based on us feeling good about ourselves.
— Orion Hindawi, to CRN, Tanium Converge 2019There's a mythology that being public is the measure of success, and that's been pervasive in the industry for the last 30-40 years. But the reality of the situation is that public companies often end up making bad decisions to service a short-term shareholder.
— David Hindawi, as recounted by Orion Hindawi in 'Counting the Experiences and Not the Years,' 2015Right and wrong is more important than what you want.
— Orion Hindawi, LinkedIn, August 2026I co-founded Tanium because endpoint management and security were broken, and I'm back because the next version of that problem is here.
Maxims
- Beat your own benchmark. The hardest competitor to surpass, and the most useful one, is the best thing you have already built.
- Aim past optimization. A goal 10,000 times beyond the baseline forces you to change the structure instead of polishing what exists.
- Ask the dull question. "How many computers do you own?" sold more software than any threat briefing.
- Show, don't pitch. A demo that looks impossible negotiates better than any deck, and it has to be real.
- Buy dissent with your cap table. Raise from strength, and choose investors for the perspective they bring, not the money.
- Liquidity is loyalty. Secondaries that pay for houses, cars, and school tuition let you stay private without shortchanging the people who built the company.
- Perks are the easy way. People are kept by mission, respect, and a sense of importance, not by nap pods and coconut water.
- Debrief everything. Put protégés in the highest-stakes rooms, then take every meeting apart with them point by point.
- Concede before you contest. Admitting the true charges plainly is the only thing that makes your denials believable.
- The seat is a function, not a possession. Step out of the CEO role when the company's main problem is operational, and step back in when the problem itself changes.
