Orion Hindawi developed a passion for computers and gaming when he was two years old. His parents would allow him to play games on Apple Lisa, which was one of the earliest computers to be launched by Apple. While studying in school, he would lend a helping hand to his father, David Hindawi, in the security patch software firm known as Big Fix. David was born in Israel, but after the exodus of Israelis to Iraq, his family was forced to stay at a relocation camp. Many years later, after graduating, he got the opportunity to complete his PhD at University of California, Berkeley Campus. His son, Orion went on to tread in his father’s footsteps and pursued his graduation from the same university. By this time he was increasingly involved in Big Fix and devoted 70-80 hours each week in the operations of the company. He then made up his mind to drop out of college as he felt no university could impart the hands-on knowledge that he was gaining while working at Big Fix. Orion was handling the technology department and was determined to make Big Fix a massive entity, but he realised that the software had reached its saturation point and there was no scope for further improvement. He decided to leave the company and, three years later, his dad sold the software to IBM. While they were satisfied with the hefty sum from IBM, David and Orion didn’t know what to do with their time. Before frustration could kick in, they decided to create yet another software from the start. The idea was to create a cyber security system for enterprises by providing them real-time views of threats from the external environment.
David and Orion together launched a peer-to-peer system software called Tanium, which could communicate information through a ring topology network. Its core functionality was to quarantine a computer to an unattainable network at the time of an external breach of security. Before its actual launch, the father-son duo did the beta test for functionality with some of their Big Fix customers and gave free runs to enterprises to test its effectiveness in their environment. It took David and Orion five years of unyielding patience and craftiness to build a valuable product that could sustain its utility over the course of time. The software turned out to be a great success, and was a major turning point in the lives of the father-son duo; they had conquered the industry with their innovation and endless appetite for achieving greatness.