Cisco bought his first company for $74m. His second might be worth more

Atif Azim. Photo credit: Publicity.

Atif Azim is an accidental entrepreneur. After his undergraduate at Imperial College, London, he was accepted for a masters in computer science at Stanford, which he gleefully accepted.

The plan was to finish his degree, find a well-paying, stable job and start paying off his humongous student debts. But what Atif – born in the United Arab Emirates to Pakistani parents – saw in San Francisco completely changed his outlook.

“The founders of Google were just six years our senior. Everyone around me was obsessed with building products and changing the world. The energy was contagious,” recalls Atif.

“And why not? One should always think big.”

After graduating in 1999, Atif decided to enter the field of technology consulting “just to get my feet wet,” and glean an idea of the emerging tech landscape in Silicon Valley. Approximately a year in, he quit to join Brience, a fast-growing startup that helped large enterprises customize mobile experiences for consumers.

The dotcom crash hit badly.

Brience – which had raised US$200 million – was considered a hot prospect for an IPO. It had already started preparing for this inevitability by filing the requisite paperwork and conducting due diligence. But the dotcom crash hit badly and those plans were shelved.

“Some people may look at that and call it a failure, but I certainly didn’t. We learned so much from it,” he says.

Atif quit shortly after, along with a couple of other people, and started wireless security firm Perfigo. His first client? Stanford.

The initial problem it solved was to clear campus networks of all the malware that students would bring in on infected laptops and PCs after summer break. System administrators for universities would have to deploy tons of resources to remove all the bugs and viruses. It was a painful and time-consuming process.

Atif and team understood they were dealing with compliance issues. All they had to do to ensure a stable network was to check whether a user had the right policies and software installed before logging on.

Other universities across the west coast started noticing Perfigo’s work and signed up. With more paying customers on board, Atif’s company began to grow fast, eventually becoming a policy compliance firm checking for things like HIPAA compliance, and financial compliance, among others.

In 2004, network security leviathan Cisco acquired Perfigo for a cool US$74 million. At the time it had 31 employees and counted Greylock Partners as one of its investors.

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