My Motives: Why am I doing what I am doing

My Motives: Why am I doing what I am doing

Imagine me, if you will, doing for Internet what the David Attenborough does for nature. I will consider myself utterly accomplished even if I could only achieve a small fraction of what David Attenborough has done bringing the beauty and power of nature to us I will describe the beauty and efficiency the way a Shark swims or how a tree pollinates by shedding its fruit that can swim thru rivers and also talk about how sharp the teeth of Sharks are how they can attack us! Internet is like Nature, its beautiful, its something we’ve come to admire, its something we can’t live without, its something that will help us propel into our next level of human evolution.

I am an Engineer! (Electronic/Computer Engineer with a BSc Degree from Bradford University from the UK, to be exact). To me an Engineer exist to make Lives of Everyone, easier, better, safer. I believe we exist to help Human evolution by creating enabling technologies! Its our job to serve you by creating technology! We all choose a path of what to create, some engineers choose to build bridges so that we can make transport easier and safer, some of us choose to build machines to speed up production, some of us choose to build internet and there are some that choose to build security to enable useful technologies like internet. That’s where I come in! I would like to create technologies that will secure internet so that we can all use it safely. Why have I chosen this? Not a clue! Honestly, since I have known myself, even when I was a child, I used to build houses that Thiefs could get in, but couldn’t get out! :slight_smile: Some people asked me: did you have a bad childhood to make you feel so insecure! :slight_smile: On contrary I had a really good childhood with loving parents and siblings and no I don’t feel insecure, I just see the insecurity in things we build (sometimes :slight_smile: ). I build my first Electronic Circuit when I was 9 years old (ok, ok, I copied the circuit diagram and I just soldered few components, that I knew nothing about, together). I thought it was OK to replace our door bell with a 20dB Siren that I had built, until my father told me off :slight_smile: ) I was just trying to make our Door answering better by having a louder door bell!!! :slight_smile: Of course, I also had my room wired so that I knew who was coming to my room and when! I have taken it as my duty as an engineer to identify vulnerabilities that could hinder our progress on Internet! Can I do it on my own? Not a chance! Are there many good people out there doing the same. Of course there are and thank god for that too! But as collective work, I can put my 110% into trying to

a)identify vulnerabilities
b)create solutions for identified vulnerabilities

Alright, Alright Melih, we get your point! You are an engineer and you want to help secure the internet, But why Internet, why not cars or satellite tv or something else?

In my younger days, I kept raking my brain with this question “why did human race rode on a horse back for thousands and thousands of years and all of a sudden, within very short period of time jumped from a horse back to a Jet plane!!”

Why?

It took me sometime! I had a very strict history teacher in high school! I hated every minute of History or Geography lessons as I did not see the point of learning what the longest river in Hungary was, but luckily one thing that stuck in my mind from one of the history lessons that my history teacher made me take a note on!

Johannes Gutenburg and the Guttenberg Press(1450) that allowed information to be retained and shared!

In my opinion, one of the greatest contributors to our Industrial Revolution was the ability to share and retain information thanks to printing!

And now we have internet! Better, more efficient, faster way of sharing and retaining information! Its interactive, can hold much more information and accessible in your home! I used to spend my Saturdays at a great book shop called Foyles in London! Now I have internet (and a back ache because I sit front of the computer too long! Ouch) I can have any information (sometimes more than what you have bargained for or ready to digest). If we are to accept that printing helped culminate the previous industrial revolution, and I totally believe that, then Internet will help create the next industrial revolution! So as an engineer, believing this to be the case I am more than motivated to make sure that “we enable internet” so that it helps the human race to take the next step into the next industrial revolution! Just think it through, how many percent of your time were you spending being connected to another human being using a technology in 1960s and how many percent of your time are you spending now being connected to another person using technology (cell phones, internet etc). If there is a mad mathematican who could draw a chart, please do and extrapolate this into the future, it will show you that we will be connected to everybody all the time! Imagine, how much of our wealth were reliant on technology in 1960s and how much of your wealth is reliant on technology now! We are becoming more reliant on technology all around, we are becoming technology ourselves! And we better make sure to identify vulnerabilities and fix them! That’s what I want to do!

Yeah but, Melih, you are the CEO of Comodo you are running a business, surely you are motivated to make money! Hmmm. True I am the founder and CEO of Comodo, yes true that I am motivated, very motivated actually to make as much money as possible! But not for money itself but what it will enable me to do. (private jets, wild parties, cool toys, houses all around the world that I don’t use, hmmmm enticing… ) well joke aside, of course I want the cool toys here and there, but I also think about kids going blind in countries because they can’t afford to buy $2 worth of cream to cure them! I can see what money can do and I also see what I can do with money! (spend, spend, spend :slight_smile: ).

A great guy and a dear friend of mine said to me once: “Melih, responsible people should make as much money as possible as they will do responsible things with that money”. My responsibility is to help enable internet by trying to fix its vulnerabilities! And I will make as much money as I can and I will spend (actually I have been spending already since I setup Comodo in 1998) (like we have spent some of the money by investing and building technologies like Comodo Personal firewall, Comodo Antivirus for free to the masses) whatever is necessary to fulfil this responsibility.

Melih

The gap between evolutionary change is shortenening rapidly. We were hunter/gatherers for 30,000 years. We then became farmers for 5 housands years. Industrialists for 5 hundred years and now we are technologists for arond 50 years. With each of these changes, the ramifications of each change were only felt well after the fact of the cahnge, and the same is holding true with the internet invasion. Luckily, the ramifications with this change are being discerned far quicker than with other changes, and I guess we users can just be grateful that there are companies like Comodo out there looking ahead of todays threat and fighting tommorow’s.

It took me sometime! I had a very strict history teacher in high school! I hated every minute of History or Geography lessons as I did not see the point of learning what the longest river in Hungary was, but luckily one thing that stuck in my mind from one of the history lessons that my history teacher made me take a note on!

Johannes Gutenburg and the Guttenberg Press(1450) that allowed information to be retained and shared!

History makes a great teacher, but a lousy master. Winston Churchill (I think)

Yeah but, Melih, you are the CEO of Comodo you are running a business, surely you are motivated to make money! Hmmm. True I am the founder and CEO of Comodo, yes true that I am motivated, very motivated actually to make as much money as possible! But not for money itself but what it will enable me to do. (private jets, wild parties, cool toys, houses all around the world that I don’t use, hmmmm enticing.. ) well joke aside, of course I want the cool toys here and there, but I also think about kids going blind in countries because they can’t afford to buy $2 worth of cream to cure them! I can see what money can do and I also see what I can do with money! (spend, spend, spend :-) ).

It is the duty of every human being to be of service, every day, to those around them. Albert Schweitzer

It is so unusual these days to read of a company, or even an individual, that is, even in part, driven by altruistic motives. Good on you, Melih. I hope you make an absolute fortune and have a ball doing it. It’s both a pleasure and a privelege to work with you guys on this.

Ewen :slight_smile:

Thanks Ewen :wink:

Melih

Melih,

I study Business Studies (among Psychology and ICT) and frequently we talk about ethical business policies, and as ewen stated, altruistic practices.

We were asked to find a business that was ethical (and sure you have businesses who try and cut pollution, don’t test on animals etc), but these are always for their own benefit to increase custom and hence profit. That is when I thought of Comodo, after reading through your posts I know you offer free products to increase sales of other products etc, but this capital you gain from doing this you use to invest further into your own products - making them better for everyone - and not doing it just for your own use like so many other businesses.

Therefore, I would like to say thank you for this method of working as you are setting the standard for other companies to follow.

Mike
(L)

Thanks Mike :slight_smile:

Melih

How to make money by giving something away.
I had the same challenge back in the Mid-80’s with a young programmer who was a junior in high school. I lived in the northeasters suburbs of Chicago and he lived in the western suburbs.
He was an Atari nut as I was. I coached him and made him present shareware and software demonstrations and evaluations at two Atari clubs per month, to help him develop really terrible presentation skills. He developed confidence, and soon had some skills dealing with people.
We created a magazine on Compuserve to promote his Atari programming skills and his company, Reeve software. We developed a program that allowed the Atari keypad to work with Atari programs.
It seems pretty silly that Atari didn’t do that, but the keypad only worked with Visicalc, and no other programs. We GAVE AWAY the program that made the keypad work and we called the program REEVEKEY, which proted the name of MR. Reeves company.
Of course, for a few bucks you could do a custom program to make the keypad do a lot of things, and that is how Mr. Reeve became a successful software company.
He graduated from an Illinois undergrad university and Clemson at the masters level He runs his own software company today.
The key was to deliver a fully functional but limited capability for free, then hook to the satisfied (and enthusiastic) user to sell him an upgrade.

Search Bruce Kennedy or Allan Reeve or Reevesoft to see the story for yourself.
Allan reached the performance level where he was close to selling Sam Tramiel the GUI on a cartridge for the Atari 130SE which made it only briefly to the retail market before Sam sold out.

Bruce Kennedy
Canton OH

I’lll be happy to help you make your product commercially successful any way I can. All I ask is that what is free really works, and doesn’t complicate the life of the user.

Bruce

Thank you very much for taking the time to write the above. I really appreciate it.

There are many (i do mean) many companies who give what I term as “crippleware” in an aim to sell the upgraded version. In our business model we have chosen NOT to do that. All the products we give are FULL version products. In your model giving software away to stimulate hardware sales is also a good method employed by likes of Check point / Cisco etc.

As far as I can see and the reviews of the products we receive, our products DO work! Of course this is software and its next to impossible to test every scenerio and we will have incidents where the software does not work! I have seen your other post about the problem you are having. The difference Comodo offers is a caring company who responds to our user’s needs immediately. So, we are more than happy to identify your issues so that we can resolve them for you and add you to many hundreds of thousands (maybe low millions by now actually) of satisfied Comodo users and have you tell everyone how happy you are with our products! After all what other return do we get apart from your happiness hence trust?!

Melih