Cybersecurity: Ray Rothrock

PUF: You have quite a distinguished background in finance, and on the subject of cybersecurity. Can you talk about that?

Ray Rothrock: I'm an old power engineer. I'm a nuclear engineer from the '70s. I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees in nuclear and went to work for Yankee Atomic. My plant was the Yankee Rowe plant, in Rowe, Massachusetts. In those days, computer codes ran on mainframes. I ran mostly 2-D modelling codes, but during this time we went to 3-D models. Very cool.

Then I moved to California. I decided that computers were the future. Three Mile Island had happened, the industry was laying people off, and it was unclear how it was going to play out.

I stayed in the industry a little longer, but ultimately wound up at Sun Microsystems in California as an application engineer, and Sun was backed by venture capital. There I met the venture capitalist who had backed Sun. I helped write the S-1, and they, and my fiancée, said, you should get an MBA and get in the venture capitalist business, so I did.

In '88 I graduated from Harvard Business School. I went to HBS with the intention of getting into the venture capitalist world. In '88 Venrock picked me up as a young associate. Venrock is the Rockefeller family high tech venture capital arm.