Copy of About Us Old

	Jerry Chen Co-Founder   Before founding Firewalla, Jerry spent nearly 20 years working at Cisco Systems, where he was a senior manager and ran many projects in Security Technology Group, Core Routing Group, and Consumer Business Unit.  He was also a member of Cisco InfoSec Team, focusing on data protection. "I invented Firewalla after my daughter's baby camera was hacked, and my goal is to prevent such things from happening to other families. "  Jerry graduated from University of California at Santa Barbara with MS and BS in Electrical Engineering.
	Melvin Tu Co-Founder   Melvin is a 10-year veteran of Cisco Systems’ Security Technology Group. There he spent much of his time creating one of the world’s leading analytics engines for cyber security monitoring. He is a fan of mobile app development, gaming, and hiking. Melvin is responsible for Engineering Melvin started college when he was 14 years old, he graduated from Southeast University with MS and BS in Computer Networking.
	Annie Lu Co-Founder   Annie worked in Cisco Systems as a senior manager for 15 years, splitting her time between Security Technology Group and Optical Networking Group. She is also a founder of a toy company and an amateur photographer. She is passionate about making customers happy. Annie is responsible for operations. Annie is a graduate of Texas Tech Univerity with a BS degree in Computer Science.

 

Hi

We are a bunch of engineers trying to solve the cybersecurity problem.  We want to bring our experiences securing large enterprises to consumers.  Something simple to use, affordable and powerful enough we like to use ourselves.

Here are some facts about our core team.

• We all know each other for more than 10 years and worked together in the same team, same company for 8 years.
• We are all developers, we all code. (except Annie, she does things in Java)
• We all worked on routers, switches, and security.   And all have real-world experiences in running Corporate Information Security.
• We all strongly believe in customer happiness is our key to success. 
• We left our corporate offices, because we believe in entrepreneurship and how it can change the world.
• Most of us are nocturnal. 

 

 

Why?

"There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don't know they have been hacked. " Quoting our previous boss Cisco System's CEO John Chambers.

When someone hacked our baby camera, we had to bring out professional equipment to fix the problem. We realized that regular folk needed a simple way to protect themselves. We asked ourselves these questions:

"What will our neighbors do if this happens to them?” 

"How will they know they’re under cyber attack?"

Our experience and these questions inspired us to create Firewalla. Our goal is to make cybersecurity both simple and affordable. We’ve packed Firewalla with all the professional tools we use in a consumer-friendly package to let people secure the world of digital things, control kids internet access, block ads and even manage social media.  And since we have families, we even built in a button called family time! 

Simple & Sophisticated

Our team is highly experienced in building very complex systems for the enterprise and service providers.  These types of equipment are often very sophisticated, because, they do a lot of things, and they do it very well.  Complex ... yes.

We want to simplify ... but not too dumb.   So behind our box, you will find our engineering culture, a simple interface, a simple box, and look deeper you will find a very powerful system that's sophisticated.

Open source software running on open hardware.

We believe cybersecurity must be open.  So we open sourced the code that runs on Firewalla, it is on GitHub and Firewalla box directly pull code from there.  Yes, you always know exactly what's running on that box.  https://github.com/firewalla

We also want to support open hardware.  Open hardware to us are boards that have an open design.   Open hardware not only significantly reduce our startup cost, it also ensures our software is highly portable. 

Our Journey

Firewalla was funded through Kickstarter with later support through Indiegogo In-demand.  We shipped all crowdfunding orders by February 2018, and we are now in full production.  We did another Indiegogo Campaign for the Firewalla Blue, which is also in production.

Our crowdfunding experience and our awesome early adopters helped us to focus and refine our product. We’d like to thank every one of our early Firewalla users.  

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/firewalla/firewalla-complete-cyber-security-solution-for-you

 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/firewalla-cyber-security-solution-for-your-home

 

https://igg.me/at/firewalla-blue/x/18678627

Our Philosophy

• Customer Happiness First. We had customers before we even had a product. We love this and want to make this an integral part of our DNA.  
• Simplify. Cybersecurity is complex, and even more complicated for the home and small business.   We want to make this experience as simple as possible.
• We believe in Evolution.  Our team believes security is based on continuous improvements. We believe in shipping code often and early to take advantage of this.
• We believe in Extensibility.  We build our software to take future advances in software and features so your system can grow.

CES 2019

Our Cave