Supplying the Demand for Cybersecurity
Alberto Yepez, Co-Founder and Managing Director of ForgePoint, has invested capital in startups concentrated on cybersecurity.
By: Timothy Baler
Ask venture capitalist Alberto Yepez how he got from his humble upbringing in Peru to where he is today, and the answer runs for thirty minutes nonstop. You get a sense that he is grounded and still tied to his roots. He also has incredible recall and tells a tale that suggests maybe he was just in the right place at the right time. He was. And the fact that he was in the right place fairly often is neither an accident nor a deliberate plan. Three or four times in those thirty minutes, Yepez offered the listener a reality check by saying, “I never thought in my wildest dreams, this would happen to me.” And that’s altogether believable. Truth can be stranger than fiction. On the other hand, the joker who first said, “Nice guys finish last” clearly never met Alberto Yepez.
He is a land shark by trade and a man who was handed chief executive officer positions at brand-name companies, but he has also stepped aside from running big companies because he sees himself “more on the innovation side and not on the optimization side.” He says his only goal was to solve business problems, which lead him into a career in cybersecurity. Squeezing profits out of operations isn’t really his thing, he says, and he remains an electrical engineer at heart. He has made millions, but he has an apologetic nature. In his wildest dreams, how did this happen to him?
Well, let’s say you were invited to help create a universe and you had the nerve to say yes. Alberto Yepez has done that. His life began in the second largest city in Peru, Ariquipa, and proceeds to engineering studies in Lima at Universidad Nacional de Ingienería, where students had to put on fund drives to pay for the experiment needed for the hands-on portion of the curriculum. He was No. 43 out of 40,000 applicants to the school applying for 2,000 openings – precocious from the start. He was then offered a scholarship to attend the University of San Francisco, after which he worked for Apple for 10 years, until 1995. Significantly, Apple groomed him for management, sending him to Caleb University for a master’s in business administration. But Apple was struggling when he got back, laying off workers (not a smart phone in sight in those days). So Yepez asked for severance from the company. His manager said no, after all, they had just paid for his education. But the manager also hinted that he could start is own company and no one could stop him.
Yes, this is the story of Internet. At the ground floor, Yepez and his wife started a consulting firm which not only grew to a team of 50 engineers in two years, but helped brand name companies (Oracle, Synopsis, Cisco and others), that were among the first Silicon Valley upstarts seeking to create a safe haven for e-commerce out of an imagined universe we now call the Internet.
As he developed his mastery of cybersecurity, Yepez, within two years, had signed up many of the world’s largest banks as clients. Then, thinking of taking his company public, Yepez, instead, yielded to temptation, selling the company outright to Entrust for $720 million. This propelled him to seat on the Entrust’s board, which is the same, essentially, as going from pauper to a player at King Arthur’s round table in the space of fifteen years.
He professes to have no secrets, no invisible guiding hand, no inside news that helped him along. He understands Latinos face discrimination and offers this succinct advice, “You have to be better than your competition and not just better – a whole lot better. You have to excel.” He also explains that many people helped him along the way and a sense of reciprocity doesn’t hurt.
Meanwhile, there are bad guys out there and Yepez says they aren’t going away anytime soon – hackers turning into cyber thieves, foreign governments turning into cyber saboteurs. In that sense, Yepez, co-founder of cybersecurity investment firm Forgepoint is putting money into companies Forgepoint feels can protect our future. He’s like the J. Edgar Hoover of the Internet, playing the game as benefactor and friend.