Wu Zhixiong is the first overseas entrepreneur interviewed by Anzi.

For more than a decade, from start-ups to Microsoft to McAfee, Mr. Wu has been fighting in the trenches of others. Wu Zhixiong, more than 40 years old, is undoubtedly an "veteran" in the field of information security - experienced and transferred to the north and south. But after his success, he decided to fight for himself once.

In rainy Seattle, Wu Zhixiong chose the road of entrepreneurship, and the direction of entrepreneurship is the emerging safety monitoring. This is a bold decision, and the return is also proud: less than a year after the start-up, top enterprises such as Facebook, China Telecom and Changhong have become their customers, and Intel and Google have become their partners.

How can a technological "veteran" create a world in the United States? Wu Zhixiong's experience may give us some inspiration.

In the spring of 2015, Wu Zhixiong, who has passed his fortitude, made a decision.

As a veteran of the security industry, Wu Zhixiong has been famous all over the world as early as 2003. At that time, working for a start-up company, he used behavior detection technology to first discover a worm attacking windows system, MSBlast, and detected that bank of America and AIG insurance company had been infected by the worm before Symantec. This achievement made the start-up company famous in the World War I and brought the company's first million level order. In the end, the company was acquired by Symantec.

Since then, Wu Zhixiong has been involved in the projects of hundreds of millions of users by famous enterprises such as Microsoft and McAfee. He once raised the number of users of a product from 100 million to 700 million, becoming the first secure big data platform for the FBI to crack down on black products and botnets.

After many years of fighting in the front line, Wu Zhixiong has achieved great success. Work is no longer a challenge to him. He felt a bit numb: was he in the early retirement?

At that time, there was a company that wanted to invite Wu Zhixiong to join. Wu Zhixiong told the company that would have become his own employer: "anyway, it's all about helping you. It's better to invest the first year's salary as an angel to let me do something more valuable."

The proposal was accepted by the other side. The veteran picked up the gun again, and this time he fought for himself.  

Which direction to choose is the most thoughtful question for entrepreneurs. As an expert in automatic detection, Wu Zhixiong is very familiar with this field. He knows that he has two choices: one is risk monitoring of mobile products, the other is apt attack monitoring. Both directions represent future trends.  

In the end, he chose the former - in an era when everything is moving, Wu believes it will be a good way to start a business. He named his new company Newsky, and the Chinese name is Qingtian.

With the explosion of mobile Internet, many users of mobile applications have grown from one million to one hundred million; and intelligent hardware, including routers, smart TVs, set-top boxes, POS machines, has gradually become the standard of modern urban life. An inevitable reality is that for these software and hardware developers, the implementation of functions will occupy most of their attention, while security will be put at the back. When changing the code and upgrading the version is enough to occupy the working time of the day, who has time to find the loopholes?

This has become the pain point of Wu Zhixiong's attention - can we make vulnerability detection simple, or even realize automatic monitoring? As long as the software and hardware to be tested are scanned once, the vulnerability threat can be roughly found, which will greatly reduce the cost of development and testing, and greatly improve the efficiency.

From the establishment of the enterprise in April 2015 to the production of beta products in July, Wu Zhixiong's speed is extremely fast. In one year, he has accumulated more than 100t of data - these data come from the scanning of nearly ten million apps in the global application market, as well as various viruses, Trojans and risk monitoring metadata. As long as the developers of mobile applications or intelligent hardware connect to this database, they can automatically detect whether there is a flaw in the product.

According to Wu Zhixiong's calculation, if an enterprise establishes a security team with Newsky or purchases an automatic monitoring module based on the cloud, it can save up to 80% - 90% of the security cost, and the detection time will be shortened from a few days to a few weeks, to a few minutes to a few hours.

Facebook is one of Wu's most famous customers. After getting through the databases of Newsky and Facebook, they can automatically find users or applications with fraud, illegal production and malicious advertising. China Telecom also introduced the service of Newsky to test the application security of its official app store.

Intelligent hardware is another application of Wu Zhixiong's automatic monitoring ability. In the smart POS and smart power market, Newsky has made breakthroughs. In the intelligent wave of traditional household appliances, Changhong Group has also become a customer of Wu Zhixiong.

Newsky's products have been recognized by many Silicon Valley security tycoons. Manny rivelo, former CEO of F5, former senior vice president of Cisco, Vincent weafer, the leader of anti-virus industry and senior vice president of Intel, and Pete Selda and mark obrecht, former founders and CEO of Symantec who were acquired by Symantec, all became his consultants or business mentors.

It's an interest that has lasted for many years to create a difficult business and support his strength to go all the way. "I basically focus on security, which is my personal interest. If what I do can help others, I will feel more fulfilled. Of course, starting a business is not purely out of interest, but now it's really about taking pains for pleasure. " Wu said.

At the beginning of entrepreneurship, how to make good products has become a habitual problem for Wu Zhixiong, a veteran of migrant workers. But with the a lot of the communication with the investors and peers, Wu found that it is not enough to only consider products. Now, his focus is on three issues - how to recruit people, how to maintain the capital chain and how to find the direction of products.

For the subtle differences in mentality between migrant workers and entrepreneurs, Wu Zhixiong thinks: "when working in enterprises, as long as you can make the engineering problems clear. But it is almost unnecessary to consider whether the understanding of customer pain points is deep and the impact of each decision on the long-term interests of the enterprise - and entrepreneurship is totally different. "

Wu Zhixiong believes that if we want to expand the security industry in the future, we must cooperate and complement each other: "we need to find more partners. In a big security solution, my product can function as a plug-in. Our adversary is black production, so it is in our interest to cooperate with other security companies. At the same time, when my company has a significant position in the platform, we will also have more gains. " Based on the open mind, Newsky has been cooperating and sharing resources with Microsoft, Google, Intel, Baidu and other enterprises to improve the security capability.

Will deep cooperation bring competition in patent field? On this point, Wu Zhixiong also has his own opinion: "we have patents, which does not mean that other people cannot do things in the same direction. In the case of machine learning, the result of market competition depends on who has stronger executive power, can make patents into landing products, and help customers solve problems that traditional antivirus and log learning can't solve. "

Wu Zhixiong once interacted with jobs at some meetings, and he was impressed by many of his practices and details: "the so-called stay hungry, stay forest is a spirit that entrepreneurs need very much, especially for those of us who start businesses late. Many of the past experiences are likely to be a burden for the future. "

Chinese entrepreneurs have a strong American complex. They are willing to go to the United States to learn from and study. In contrast, many domestic security enterprises are complaining that the domestic cake is not big enough and the industry glass door is heavy. But for Wu Zhixiong, who worked in the United States when he was young, starting a business in the United States will not be easier: "from the perspective of starting a business, Silicon Valley and Beijing are actually no different, and it is also difficult to start a business in the United States."

Wu Zhixiong's personal experience is that the security talents in the United States are equally difficult to recruit, and the customers in the United States need to repeatedly educate the value of security. In a sense, the Internet user base in the United States is not even as good as that in China: "the 2C field in China is far from that in the United States. According to the data, by 2017, there will be an average of five IOT devices per adult, which is likely to be achieved in China by then, but it is still hard to achieve in the United States. "

Because of the cultural background of China and the United States, Wu's team also absorbed many Chinese. Unlike many security products with only English version, Wu Zhixiong's products almost always have good Chinese version, which also expands another market that cannot be ignored. Wu Zhixiong will return to China once a quarter to handle the relationship with domestic customers.

In China, automatic monitoring has also attracted the attention of entrepreneurs. The emergence of projects such as Bangbang, Naga and aiencrypted makes Wu Zhixiong proud of the development speed of domestic mobile security on the one hand, and has a deep sense of "crisis": in the field of mobile security monitoring, China's development speed may even be faster than the United States. Both bang bang and love encryption have found their own characteristics, which is to help developers do code protection to ensure that your code will not be stolen by hackers. And we are helping developers win the market: to prevent users' privacy and enterprise data leakage. "

Wu Zhixiong, who has an in-depth observation of the technical level in the field of domestic security and the security circles at home and abroad, thinks: "the domestic technology is very strong, it must be an international level, and we are very proud of it. McAfee, a researcher, can't stay. He is willing to return to China. This is a normal and healthy flow of talents. "

In the United States, Mr. Wu often sees some American security companies using China-U.S. relations as a pretext. He believes that this phenomenon is more due to pr (Public Relations) factors: "there is bound to be political conflict between China and the United States, and some Silicon Valley companies will also link loopholes and politics when doing pr. In terms of the effect of PR, it is obviously more commercial value to talk about China, the second largest country in the world, or to be an imaginary enemy. " However, it does not seem to affect the flow of security talents at present. "I don't know what taboos are, and I hope I don't," Wu said. Some of my colleagues work in sensitive companies and positions, and can still change jobs. It is also relatively free to travel. After all, learning is learning, and politics is politics. "

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