Who among us hasnt faced that decidedly nerdy teenage crisis?
NowMalwarebyteshas a team of over 320 employees and its various products have been downloaded about half a billion times.
Not a bad place to be for something that started on the family computer in the basement.
We spoke with Marcin to learn a little more about his experience in the fight against malware.
Tell us about how Malwarebytes came about.
Evidently you decided to take the matter into your own hands!
I was certainly young, and still living in my parents basement.
We had a shared family computer that I practically destroyed by downloading a stolen video game.
We had an antivirus installed and it let the malware right through.
The pop-ups wouldnt stop, and the whole family blamed me.
So I took matters into my own hands and found help in the form of an online support forum.
A volunteer walked me through a very manual, fifty step process to get rid of the malware.
Believe it or not, I learned how to program from a for dummies book.
Its that yellow one that youre embarrassed to read in public.
Why did the project continue to grow?
Were you simply fascinated by malware?
I fell in love with how malware worked but also wanted to be a superhero of sorts.
I saw traditional antivirus software had failed and let malware into my computer firsthand.
How did you choose which platforms to target and which to ignore or wait on?
We started with Windows, which was the predominant attack surface for most criminals at the time.
At what point did it go from a hobby to something you realized could be a business?
I think this was more gradual than most people expect.
What was your biggest roadblock and how did you overcome it?
Being such a dispersed and remote company was a big roadblock.
I wasnt even at the office while attending the University of Illinois.
We had to sort through many communication issues and be mindful about how we shared information with each other.
How do you handle user requests and criticisms effectively?
Today, if I receive an email from a user or customer, I will always respond to it.
Bottom line, I prefer getting the negative feedback because I can be opportunistic and fix it!
Now, how do you split time between developing new features and managing existing ones?
Ive found that having this all on one team makes it impossible to solve.
There will always be a battle on splitting the time.
So we built a whole separate team.
We built our anti-rootkit and anti-ransomware technologies in this lab.
What advice would you give to others that want to take on a similar project?
Build a product within a community that is passionate about what youre building.
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