Over the past eight years, I’ve been honored to work alongside a world-class group of professionals—including the Webroot team, and our growing network of partners and customers. Our security community has grown into something special, and powerful. With tremendous gratitude for that experience, I am sharing my plan to retire as CEO of Webroot. Mike Potts will be joining Webroot as CEO and a member of the Board of Directors on September 25, 2017, and I will continue to serve on Webroot’s Board of Directors.
As I look back and think about the highlights of the past 8 years, a few stand out for me:
- Introducing the first “next gen” endpoint solution, built in the cloud and leveraging contextual threat analysis for greater efficacy against zero day threats than was possible before.
- Establishing Webroot as a highly innovation company and expanding our portfolio from endpoint protection to network protection, threat intelligence and security awareness training.
- Winning the prestigious Thomas J. Edison Award for Innovation, the first ever awarded to a security company.
- Building out a team of almost 600 talented Webrooters across the world, including outstanding teams from our acquisitions of BrightCloud, PrevX, CyberFlow Analytics and Securecast.
- Achieving #1 status in the major markets where we compete, like consumer retail in North America, and managed service providers and embedded threat intelligence worldwide.
- Growing our customer base to millions of consumers, over 9,000 managed service providers and 210,000 businesses.
- And, achieving with the close of this last fiscal year 14 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.
What stands out most for me, though, is the extraordinary people. My years at Webroot were the most satisfying of my 52 years in business, and I’ve never worked with a finer group of people—employees, customers and partners alike. We created a uniquely collaborative relationship with our customers and partners, which led to not only the highest satisfaction rates in the industry, but also a great source of inspiration for how our products could evolve to solve new problems. The success of Webroot is our shared accomplishment.
It’s time for me to pass the baton, and I am confident Mike Pott’s is the right person to lead Webroot going forward. Mike’s passion, vision, and industry knowledge paired with the talented team in place means you have just seen the beginning of innovation from Webroot. I can’t wait to see what this team accomplishes in the coming years and hear about all of the successful implementations from our customers and partners.
Thank you,
Dick Williams
