Pavel Baudis built a massive software company out of Czech communism's ashes. It's made him a billionaire and protected millions from cybercriminals.
Share to linkedinn the rooftop terrace of the five-star Hotel U Prince, Pavel Baudis surveys the city he’s lived in for most of his 59 years. Over his shoulder is Prague’s tourist-heavy town square and the grand gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady before Týn; in front of him stand serried ranks of ochre rooftops.
Among Baudis’ more profitable decisions was recruiting a headstrong American to turn Avast into a giant-killer. That man, sitting across from Baudis, talking over the cackles of tourists and the cooing of dating couples, is Vince Steckler, Avast’s CEO for the past decade. It’s the first time the two have been interviewed together by an English-language publication since the IPO.
Baudis has taken actions you’d associate with modern tech tycoons like Mark Zuckerberg, but without the showiness. He ended his work on a chemistry degree in the late 1980s, admitting he wasn’t a natural scientist, and applied his hungry mind to computers. Under the Soviet regime, few consumer computers were available to Baudis, but he managed to get his hands on an Olivetti M24 while he was working at the severe sounding Research Institute for Mathematical Machines.
Whereas the likes of Kaspersky, McAfee and Symantec’s Norton antivirus would make money from the one-off cost of their tools, sold at Best Buy and other retail stores, Avast brought in revenue by encouraging users to purchase and download the full-featured versions of the software, which became smarter over time as the freemium tools fed it with the vast amounts of threat data they were collecting.
The Avast Omni box will be bundled into a yearly subscription that covers computers and cellphones. No other anti-virus rival has gone as deep into the home, and Steckler admits it’s a risk. But according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Tony Massimini, if anyone’s positioned to do it, it’s Avast. “It’s been something people have been talking about, but let’s see if you can actually make it work. I’d think Avast has a pretty good shot at doing that.
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