And with the sale of his company to Cisco Systems for approximately $635 million announced today, we’re excited to see the vision he’s made real has been recognized not just by employees and customers and his investors, but now by Cisco, the largest networking company in the world. One day I hope David shares some of the near-death experiences the company faced over the years as it made these transitions, and how he led his team to rally and overcome them not just to survive, but to thrive.ĭavid’s goal for OpenDNS was the same back in 2009 as it is today: build the world’s largest Internet security network. Now it’s focused on the enterprise and secures some of the largest companies in the world. When we invested, the company was exclusively consumer focused. When we invested in the business, 100% of its revenue came from advertising. The next step was to shift the business away from advertising and toward enterprise subscriptions. Shortly after our investment in the company, we brought him back to the role. But we saw in David what Sequoia has consistently seen in our most successful founders-a unique insight and the drive to make it happen. He had previously stepped aside from the role of CEO-even though he had been successful-based on the hope that a ‘pro CEO’ could do an even better job. When we partnered with OpenDNS, David was not CEO.

OpenDNS was perfectly positioned for two of the biggest market shifts of our time: the impact of smartphones and the move to the cloud.

It was clear there was so much potential there: a deeply technical founder, fantastic team, loyal and growing userbase, and globally-distributed network that could be used to deliver lots of different types of services.

When we first met and partnered with David Ulevitch in 2009, OpenDNS was already well known and profitable, having grown to tens of millions of users in its first few years.

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